Intorno alla mia cattiva educazione
Italian for: Around my bad (deficient) education
During the last week I experienced a funny (rather sweet) flash-back into some memories while researching for our group presentation, maybe I was a bit over-sensitized by some personal remembrances (including the birth of my niece in 1986), the golden age of wandering for this guy (me, your author, ha ha), my first alone-out-of-home experience, curious family habits, etc., and as a result, I was driven back into the kind of Italian literature which flooded my mind and time in the early 80's; important authors—due to their focus in themes like being, representation and space: that is virtual worlds and identity!—like Cesare Pavese, Luigi Pirandello and Italo Calvino.
This week our task is to comment on two out of four or five articles around librarians and journalist working in SL and their tasks within VW, my two selected readings are: “ Librarians in Virtual Worlds : Why get a Second Life?” by Ilene Frank and “Taking New World Notes, An embedded journalist's rough guide to reporting from inside the Internet next evolution” by Wagner James Au.
Now—frankly speaking—before being able to sketch some ideas on these, I must confess that the loop in my memory, described before, linked me to some rare and exquisite (and old) progressive Italian rock music. At that time I used to follow maniacally several of those progressive Jazz-Rock bands all over the Peninsula. The title of this entry is the same of a vinyl record from one of them (Allusa Fallax); curiously enough the lyrics of that vinyl are related to the subject of my two selected readings: education, new worlds and its stories, journalists working under special conditions and how well (or not so) are people equipped to deal with.
So still under that particular ‘mood’ I would proceed in the way I used to do when living, studying and working in Italy, after all, in many ways, that was my real (former) Second Life. In order to improve my immersion in, and to increase utterance and command of the language (Italian) I began to write fictional scripts like imaginary interviews or invented pseudo-analytical paragraphs whenever I'd have to speak or present a text, article or other material in question. Those texts included a singular feature: a ‘might be but not-necessarily true’ dimension, that helped me out a lot with my written skills, getting a more flexible (loose) tongue and aided me to resume and partially resolve my blockage at the verbal ‘gates’ of the brain—so to speak— a condition which I suffer since the 4 years of age (but I'm good with numbers and drawing mom!).
With the funny but persistent aid of my professors Dr. Pacinotti and Dr. Tobbia, I became able to write—after a year and a half of that fictional exercise—increasingly pertinent stuff to my subject (at least that was my permanent goal). What I'm trying to establish here is that, when you make room and you develop the right strategy into ‘owning’ other's writing/words, your following actions, like underscoring the (actual) author's main subject and/or intention, become relatively transparent. Something happens that makes you feel like you were in the intimate known of the question from before.
This way I began to add explications and/or written comments to those inventions, from the comfort of a subjective ‘mood’ or more personal feeling, and then, providing located sustain for the arguments as well. This process comes to my mind in the same way that many perceived conditions in Second Life do: as a form of ‘exile’ thought (I'm not sure I can explain this figure accurately, but this is my normal visual metaphor when I hear the words objective, objectivity, truth and rational). So let's begin with Mrs. Ilene Frank:
“ Librarians in Second Life: Why Get a Second Life? ”
The argument is pretty obvious, librarians and libraries have to ‘come’ to find their users and also they have to stay in tune with the kind of new tools/ethos users are currently using; although the question of how a 3D virtual world can be enhanced through an increasing number of on line virtual library services should be discussed in depth. For me this involves also talking about the role of differentiated aesthetic practices; the role of transduction, telepresence and the symbiotic emergency of flows of information into, and from, digitized identities (what Anna Munster calls ‘flickering’ identities). There is no place like SL to explore the benefit of non-conventional embodiment/disembodiment practices, which are being increasingly mediated by the exchange of meaningful data. Also important in my view is to locate the options of exploring other ways of interfacing (perhaps merging certain core database index features within semantic searching tools within, or out SL). Of course it is cool to have access to any kind of (re)searchable data from an intimate suite of connectivity tools like SL provides to its residents, but still a lot of different aspects must be redesigned. Additionally I would consider worth including in this scenario, a theoretical approach to databases and maps as the dominant syn-aesthetic forms in virtual worlds. (for this point in particular, check my link to Sean Cubitt's blog here)
Once again a taxonomy of virtual worlds should include its drawbacks as well, in the particular case of SL: A serious lack of immersion appeal is, somehow counterbalanced, by the empowering supply of tools to build and create and the limited but interesting set to work (on the go) in two crucial zones, from an aesthetic point of view: self-representation modifiers and instant communication (audio being one of the more powerful). Convergence of media formats in a ‘portable’ or ubiquitous set of devices, may turn the experience of wandering around SL from one close to sensory disappointment, to a one full of chances to interact and develop sociability paths, whether you participate in a more gregarious or individual way, in a more involved and direct or remote and dislocated one, the truth is, that your performance and ‘growing’ as a resident is entirely mediated by two aspects: your applied creativity and your capacity to activate and filter societal exchanging practices, from shopping or academic based participation to a fictional and pure imagination based ones.
And of course not (thank god) not everything that happens in real life can happen on Second Life. If it would we probably start to dropping out our accounts, if we could reverse the equation (anything that happens in SL can be transducted to RL), all the panorama would become sexier.
I certainly can't go as long as it should here with this point, but I probably will be back to this subject in my next entry. The role of humour seems to be a great discovery for Mrs. Frank, in terms of a shared, enjoyable and yet! serious and productive activity if this is a direct outcome of the interface interaction and role behaviours in virtual world's playing, that is doubtful. However I think we should encompass this concept within a broader theory of Visualization, Design and Creativity, because, Sl is once again, the perfect field of experimentation for the unconventional characterization of those ‘gifts’ that people (perhaps Librarians in the eye of Mrs. Frank) very often (auto)edit or repress in themselves, because of insecurity, fear of peer judgment or basic shyness. Don't get me wrong, some of the most hilarious and imaginative people I know, in one end, and some of the most apathetic, dull and flat ones, share the same vocation/profession: librarians. Although I can extrapolate as well this same impression to the community of visual and New Media Artists, which I'm more familiar with. So, in my view, is not the inherent attribute of a community, and individual or a technology what it counts, but perhaps a combination of all of them what characterizes the bridging between play, fun, humour to intellectual productive labour.
At the end the relationship between creativity, skills, intellectual performance and humour must also—I think—being traced in a broader theoretical framework that range from Collective Thought to Aesthetic, Humour and Playfulness. For an interesting enhanced view on this, I invite you to check here the link to the article:
belonging to the “Chili con Darwin” Spicy Food for Thought Blog, authored by my mexican ex-student and dear friend Paula Bourges-Waldegg.
Ok now it's time to make a short break but I will be back soon to comment on Wagner James Au's article
From AU J. Wagner
• Highlight, page 1
On an innovation scale, Second Life suggested the potential for MMOs to also be a development platform for commercial, educational, and research projects
• Highlight, page 1
As broadband and high end PCs saturate the international market, it’s time to consider MMOs as the likeliest candidate for the Internet’s next generation, supplanting the two dimensional, semi–interactive portal of the Web for an immersive, three– dimensional, fully interactive Metaverse of data.
• Highlight, page 1
Unlike the Web revolution of the ’90s, documenting the emergence of online worlds is something that will be conducted from the inside, immersed within the media itself.
• Highlight, page 1
a new kind of journalistic ethics for a world where reality and identity are mutable and anonymity is both hazard and godsend.
• Highlight, page 1
these worlds can help us understand the conflicts and values of our own material world
• Highlight, page 1
To emphasize how crucial the need to understand this next dramatic shift for the Internet, the author offers five likely futures in which online worlds directly impact national and international politics and the global economy — a time when MMOs help decide the outcomes of real–world elections and influence long–established jurisprudence, while authoritarian government attempt to repress them, and they become the next theater for terrorist and counterterrorist infiltration.
• Highlight, page 1
anti–tax protest featuring tea crates and dancing rats
• Highlight, page 2
I’ve interviewed strippers and Catholic priests, combat veterans and peace activists, socialist utopians and midget warmongers. I’ve profiled entrepreneurs who own whole continents and earn six figure incomes from the buying and selling of virtual land, and a homeless hacker who built a virtual mansion while squatting in an abandoned building.
• Highlight, page 3
none of these events or persons really exist, except as data bits in a San Francisco server farm, they’re part of the best story I’ve ever been lucky enough to cover as a journalist. Because I’ve come to believe that it’s an inadvertent advance report on the future of the Internet, and how we’ll interact in it in decades to come.
• Highlight, page 3
The closest thing we have to the computer–created universe envisioned in Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, MMOs are persistent, self–contained Internet worlds that people across the globe simultaneously inhabit, through alter egos called avatars (from the Sanskrit for “incarnation”). The fantasy MMOs Worlds of Warcraft and the Lineage franchise of South Korea are two of the biggest, with well over 10 million users between them [2]
• Highlight, page 3
The worldwide growth of MMOs is one of the most misreported technology stories in recent years, pigeonholed as mere online entertainment when it is really the harbinger of the new global economy and culture, in ways that even noted thinkers like Thomas Friedman don’t understand
• Highlight, page 3
(In Friedman’s The World is Flat, he gives just passing mention of Asia’s computer game industry, and says nothing about MMOs. Just two points to suggest how great an oversight this is: in South Korea, an estimated one in twelve members of the entire population have played an MMO called Lineage [4]; in China, a whole cottage industry is devoted to “gold harvesting”, the acquisition of gold coins and other fictional money in MMOs [5].)
• Highlight, page 3
I visited the Linden Lab office for a demo of Second Life, I learned they didn’t want not me to write about their world, so much as write for it, as a journalist — an embedded journalist, as it were
• Highlight, page 4
From open oceans spring sailboats, submarines, and cruise ships; from the plains come racing tracks, clothing–optional nightclubs, and Resident–made games of all size and style. From the mountains appears sprawling, Frank Lloyd Wright–style homes, tree villages, and heavily–armed World War II fortresses. In all this, there’s a distinct sense of an expanding wilderness being settled
• Highlight, page 4
But I began my beat just as major combat operations in Iraq were winding down, and the real–world conflict spurred a brutal culture war among the Residents. At the time, the regions where player–versus–player combat was allowed were separated from the rest of the continent by an imposing, Cold War–era wall.
• Highlight, page 4
On one side were the Residents who enjoyed combat– oriented mayhem, and they tended to support going to war with Saddam’s Iraq (many were veterans or active–duty military); on the wall’s opposite side were a loose contingent of antiwar advocates, many of them artists and dreamers who see Second Life as a creative palette
• Highlight, page 5
As I write this in mid–November 2005, WoW boasts 4.5 million subscribers around the globe — 1.5 million in China alone [7]. To be on a World of Warcraft server is to share the same virtual space with thousands of people from over a dozen countries, living a lucid dream of adventure and heroism.
• Highlight, page 5
my colleague Cory Ondrejka recently dubbed WoW “the new golf”, considering all the informal get–togethers business and academic colleagues have within it, preferring their shop talk with broadswords and chain mail, than nine irons and plaid pants [9].
• Highlight, page 6
Many of these projects capitalize on academic research that seems to validate the sense people familiar with MMOs already grasp intuitively: the experience of one’s alter ego being in an immersive space is experientially different from any other kind of Net–mediated interface that has come before it. Different, and in several key ways, better, than the limited, distanced, largely asynchronous interactivity of the Web as it exists now. An MMO quite literally offers a direct pathway into data, and global collaboration with an international community through avatars that afford each individual a high degree of anonymity, and paradoxically, an equally high degree of self–representation. With so much potential, and the technical/commercial infrastructure in place to make it feasible, it’s difficult to imagine online worlds not becoming the next real leap in the Internet’s evolution.
• Highlight, page 6
If in a few short years online worlds become synonymous with the Internet, it’ll large be because it’s what we want it become.
• Highlight, page 6
“Torley Torgeson” turns the SL 6 of 14 11/9/08 9:36 PM experience into a uniquely personal (and uniquely lovable) journey full of Joyceian digressions and watermelons; “Urizenus Sklaar” and “Walker Spaight” cheekily treat it as tabloid fodder, including gossip and soft–core Page Six avatar cheesecake — while also conducting field research for freelance stories in the New York Times, and preparing for an upcoming book based on their blog. There’s a journal devoted to artificial life in an artificial world and there’s a journal on the internal voting system. With the appearance of every quality SL blog, I feel not the pull of competition but a quiet sense of relief; my beat was hard enough when the world had the population of a small town, let alone the size of a small city. (As of February 5, 2006, total population stands well over 130,000.) [16] Au http://www.uic.edu.proxy2.lib.uwo.ca:2048/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/ind...
• Highlight, page 7
experience into a uniquely personal (and uniquely lovable) journey full of Joyceian digressions and watermelons; “Urizenus Sklaar” and “Walker Spaight” cheekily treat it as tabloid fodder, including gossip and soft–core Page Six avatar cheesecake — while also conducting field research for freelance stories in the New York Times, and preparing for an upcoming book based on their blog. There’s a journal devoted to artificial life in an artificial world and there’s a journal on the internal voting system. With the appearance of every quality SL blog, I feel not the pull of competition but a quiet sense of relief; my beat was hard enough when the world had the population of a small town, let alone the size of a small city. (As of February 5, 2006, total population stands well over 130,000.) [16]
• Highlight, page 7
Of course, the subject matter is most immediately appealing to technophiles and gamers, but that’s really just the surface material. I am talking about seeing the citizens of online worlds as a cross–section of the world itself. I am talking about online worlds as a transmission space for “hard” news, first page material on subjects that have enormous and widespread impact on the global community.
• Highlight, page 8
Here, the potential for MMOs as a journalistic resource is even greater in the larger fantastical worlds. In Second Life, it’s typical for an avatar to be a stylized version of what a person looks like in real life; in the past, some Residents have been reluctant to reveal aspects of their first lives for that very reason. Men and women with hard stories to relate may be able to better speak the deepest truths of their lives through the maw of a hobgoblin.
• Highlight, page 8
a need that goes way beyond the assumption that online worlds are the next Web. They speak to the reality of online worlds as a model for our own, a collectively shared and collaboratively created thought experiment, or something resembling the parables of magic rings, dungeons, and eternal cities that Plato spun out for his students to help them discern the real principles of right action through the filter of the fantastic.
• Highlight, page 8
Missed opportunities like this speak to a n
• Highlight, page 8
There is so much to learn. MMOs can teach us things about the real role of gender and sexuality when hearts are engaged, before bodies [23]; or the expectations of race, when that quality is no longer skin deep [24]. There’s things to learn about how spirituality survives in a post–belief, hedonistic society [25], or how a new world can alter the prejudices of national identity [26].
• Box, page 8
There is so much to learn. MMOs can teach us things about the real role of gender and sexuality when hearts are engaged, before bodies [23]; or the expectations of race, when that quality is no longer skin deep [24]. There’s things to learn about how spirituality survives in a post–belief, hedonistic society [25], or how a new world can alter the prejudices of national identity [26].
• Highlight, page 8
Having a history in common builds and sustains a community — which in naked terms, keeps paying customers around longer, while encouraging new ones to immigrate. In return, the rest of us gain another resource for insights into the essential human condition when it’s made digital.
• Highlight, page 9
What does a reporter do when he finally has a direct, absolute means for knowing the truth of things? (Ontological fact checking?)
• Highlight, page 9
a pomo axiom on the order of “real life and the virtual are indistinguishable in meaning”
• Highlight, page 9
This principle really began with Linden Lab’s Terms of Service rules for Second Life, which forbid revealing real life personal details of any Resident without their consent. In the course of reporting, I began to see the value of maintaining this confidentiality — never mentioning real names of Residents, or even where they lived, saying “the West Coast” instead of “Los Angeles,” for example. A Resident confident that their real life won’t be unveiled by me is a Resident free to talk openly, perhaps for the first time with anyone.
• Box, page 11
1 — An E.U. or U.S. court fully deliberates on a virtual property dispute within an online world Last year, several criminal cases provoked by ownership disputes within virtual worlds occurred in Asia, leading inevitably to a court’s ruling that enumerates some legal rights in this medium [32]. What is still forthcoming (but certainly imminent) is a civil suit brought by one subscriber against another, where the owner of the world is effectively a witness for either party (or both.) Foreseeing this very possibility, an established lawyer built a law office in Second Life this fall, a Greco–Roman affair with fountains, marble columns, and large books helpfully describing the terms of copyright, trademark, and patent throughout the G20 states. For now, her law office is an information resource and general advice center. But she is already forming plans on take on real clients that come to her in SL, looking for solutions — and real contracts to sign, and potentially, real torts to file [33]. 2 — A mainstream political party creates an official campaign headquarters in an online world I reported on an unofficial Second Life campaign headquarters to John F. Kerry a couple months before the last election, the work of a young Democratic activist who created the thing on her own, and ran it with as much diligence as a real life staffer for the Senator. (The anti–Kerry phalanx was also working diligently: days after the Kerry campaign HQ was in business, an equally energized Kerry opponent acquired building rights on neighboring land, and encircled the Senator’s platform with looming anti–Kerry billboards of the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” variety.) So the construction of the headquarters is feasible; all that remains is for MMOs to follow the trajectory of blogs, in this regards. It was unthinkable in 2000 that the major candidates would invest any amount of attention in Web logs run by amateur enthusiasts; by 2004, it was unthinkable to campaign without them. 3 — Authoritarian governments and terrorists recognize online worlds as having the potential to threaten or empower their interests As I write this, there are 59 Second Life Residents who log in from mainland China. Three are in Iran; twelve are in Saudi Arabia [34]. In late 2005, the Chinese government sought (and was granted) access to Yahoo’s e–mail servers, so they could track down the location of an anti–government message writer. The upshot was a dissident in jail [35]. As shocking a moral compromise as this was, it was not an unexpected one; the “Great Firewall of China” polices Web–based traffic moving across the country’s geographic region. As of this date, the firewall does not evidently block counterrevolutionary speech transmitted within online worlds. So far, Chinese authorities have not cracked down on political expression in MMOs (though they have imposed limits on play time, arguably an indirect abridgement of free speech.) With over a million paying Chinese subscribers in World of Warcraft alone, however, sheer numbers make it inevitable that some will soon directly test the limits of political expression there, too. Picture a solemn online memorial to the students killed at Tiananmen Square, convened by a few dozen survivors of the massacre (now tech workers in the enterprise zones) offering to their fallen comrades a procession of torches and prayers in Stormwind Castle [36]. There’s an even darker side to this. From what we can discern, the war on Islamist terrorists is largely a Net–based operation; face–to–face meetings among cell members of al–Qaeda and its many franchise operations are rare; rarer still the actual horrific attacks. The al–Qaeda operation is for the most part a virtual one, conducted in the intersection of encrypted cell phones, pagers, and most of all, the Web. On that trajectory, the obvious next step is for them to plan and organize with an MMO, especially those that allow some level of customer–created content. Especially since U.S. Homeland Security is already there, training to prepare for their next attack. What better way to explore strategies, simulate their execution, all the while studying the weaknesses of the enemy? [37] When this happens, the next plausible scenario is a sudden influx of Feds and international legal authorities joining the MMO in question. And just as likely (and I’m indebted to Cory Ondrejka for this speculation), subscribers will form anti–terrorist coalitions, and conduct genuine counter–strikes in the form of “white hat” griefing against them. A battle against terrorism conducted from entirely within an online world. This was once just a scenario for a science fiction novel, but by now, the time to be astounded is long past.
• Highlight, page 11
Picture a solemn online memorial to the students killed at Tiananmen Square, convened by a few dozen survivors of the massacre (now tech workers in the enterprise zones) offering to their fallen comrades a procession of torches and prayers in Stormwind Castle [36].
During the last week I experienced a funny (rather sweet) flash-back into some memories while researching for our group presentation, maybe I was a bit over-sensitized by some personal remembrances (including the birth of my niece in 1986), the golden age of wandering for this guy (me, your author, ha ha), my first alone-out-of-home experience, curious family habits, etc., and as a result, I was driven back into the kind of Italian literature which flooded my mind and time in the early 80's; important authors—due to their focus in themes like being, representation and space: that is virtual worlds and identity!—like Cesare Pavese, Luigi Pirandello and Italo Calvino.
This week our task is to comment on two out of four or five articles around librarians and journalist working in SL and their tasks within VW, my two selected readings are: “ Librarians in Virtual Worlds : Why get a Second Life?” by Ilene Frank and “Taking New World Notes, An embedded journalist's rough guide to reporting from inside the Internet next evolution” by Wagner James Au.
Now—frankly speaking—before being able to sketch some ideas on these, I must confess that the loop in my memory, described before, linked me to some rare and exquisite (and old) progressive Italian rock music. At that time I used to follow maniacally several of those progressive Jazz-Rock bands all over the Peninsula. The title of this entry is the same of a vinyl record from one of them (Allusa Fallax); curiously enough the lyrics of that vinyl are related to the subject of my two selected readings: education, new worlds and its stories, journalists working under special conditions and how well (or not so) are people equipped to deal with.
So still under that particular ‘mood’ I would proceed in the way I used to do when living, studying and working in Italy, after all, in many ways, that was my real (former) Second Life. In order to improve my immersion in, and to increase utterance and command of the language (Italian) I began to write fictional scripts like imaginary interviews or invented pseudo-analytical paragraphs whenever I'd have to speak or present a text, article or other material in question. Those texts included a singular feature: a ‘might be but not-necessarily true’ dimension, that helped me out a lot with my written skills, getting a more flexible (loose) tongue and aided me to resume and partially resolve my blockage at the verbal ‘gates’ of the brain—so to speak— a condition which I suffer since the 4 years of age (but I'm good with numbers and drawing mom!).
With the funny but persistent aid of my professors Dr. Pacinotti and Dr. Tobbia, I became able to write—after a year and a half of that fictional exercise—increasingly pertinent stuff to my subject (at least that was my permanent goal). What I'm trying to establish here is that, when you make room and you develop the right strategy into ‘owning’ other's writing/words, your following actions, like underscoring the (actual) author's main subject and/or intention, become relatively transparent. Something happens that makes you feel like you were in the intimate known of the question from before.
This way I began to add explications and/or written comments to those inventions, from the comfort of a subjective ‘mood’ or more personal feeling, and then, providing located sustain for the arguments as well. This process comes to my mind in the same way that many perceived conditions in Second Life do: as a form of ‘exile’ thought (I'm not sure I can explain this figure accurately, but this is my normal visual metaphor when I hear the words objective, objectivity, truth and rational). So let's begin with Mrs. Ilene Frank:
“ Librarians in Second Life: Why Get a Second Life? ”
• From, page 1
“ Educators and librarians have been exploring Second Life, a 3D virtual world. With more and more users in virtual worlds, educators and librarians need to keep themselves informed about the ways these platforms can be useful. {...] Why should librarians and educators care about virtual worlds such as Second Life? That is where our users are headed. More and more of our users are becoming familiar and comfortable with virtual worlds.”
The argument is pretty obvious, librarians and libraries have to ‘come’ to find their users and also they have to stay in tune with the kind of new tools/ethos users are currently using; although the question of how a 3D virtual world can be enhanced through an increasing number of on line virtual library services should be discussed in depth. For me this involves also talking about the role of differentiated aesthetic practices; the role of transduction, telepresence and the symbiotic emergency of flows of information into, and from, digitized identities (what Anna Munster calls ‘flickering’ identities). There is no place like SL to explore the benefit of non-conventional embodiment/disembodiment practices, which are being increasingly mediated by the exchange of meaningful data. Also important in my view is to locate the options of exploring other ways of interfacing (perhaps merging certain core database index features within semantic searching tools within, or out SL). Of course it is cool to have access to any kind of (re)searchable data from an intimate suite of connectivity tools like SL provides to its residents, but still a lot of different aspects must be redesigned. Additionally I would consider worth including in this scenario, a theoretical approach to databases and maps as the dominant syn-aesthetic forms in virtual worlds. (for this point in particular, check my link to Sean Cubitt's blog here)
• From page 2No comments, those numbers speak for themselves and constituted the paradigmatic argument of forecast sustain into the emergence of 3D Web as the ‘natural’ next stage on networked communications; somehow a fascinating but also partially deterministic view in itself.
Nick Yee (2006) studied the demographics of 30,000 users over three years using online gaming environments. Users ranged from 11–68 years of age with an average of 26.57 years of age. These users spent an average of 22 hours a week. The Gartner Group (2008) estimated that 80 percent of active Internet users will be using virtual worlds by the end of 2011. Virtual worlds are becoming a familiar and favored environment for many users. The Association of Virtual Worlds (2008) lists 250 virtual worlds.
• To give you an idea of how many are using virtual worlds, World of Warcraft boasted of ten million players in January 2008. There.com has one million users. Club Penguin has around 700,000 paid accounts and 12 million active users.
• From page 3
Virtual worlds have captured the attention of educators who are eager to explore the possibilities of simulation, role–playing, and creation that are possible in virtual environments. [...] Why has Second Life gotten a lot of attention? Why was Second Life mentioned over and over again at the 2008 WebWise meetings in Miami? Here are some possible reasons.
• Users can join for free and stay on Second Life without spending any money
• Second Life is open to anyone over 17 years of age
• [I] could explore Second Life without waiting for my institution to decide to provide a server, software, and technical support
• Residents of Second Life can build whatever they can imagine
• Along with being able to build, users own the digital objects they create. They can make them freely available to others or sell them for Linden dollars
• A drawback of Second Life is that objects cannot be exported for use in other virtual worlds at this point.
• Educators involved in Second Life are developing a comfort level with virtual worlds that should stand them in good stead.
• Second Life allows users to interact with others from around the world using text chat or voice
Once again a taxonomy of virtual worlds should include its drawbacks as well, in the particular case of SL: A serious lack of immersion appeal is, somehow counterbalanced, by the empowering supply of tools to build and create and the limited but interesting set to work (on the go) in two crucial zones, from an aesthetic point of view: self-representation modifiers and instant communication (audio being one of the more powerful). Convergence of media formats in a ‘portable’ or ubiquitous set of devices, may turn the experience of wandering around SL from one close to sensory disappointment, to a one full of chances to interact and develop sociability paths, whether you participate in a more gregarious or individual way, in a more involved and direct or remote and dislocated one, the truth is, that your performance and ‘growing’ as a resident is entirely mediated by two aspects: your applied creativity and your capacity to activate and filter societal exchanging practices, from shopping or academic based participation to a fictional and pure imagination based ones.
• From page 4Well, yes and no, Lacan is still working/searching for ways of getting an avatar for himself in SL, that is to say an avatar for an avatar. So far aggregation of (Lacan) biomass can look funny on the screen, but in the middle run, if one kind of scripting language (Action Script) can talk to another (Linden script language) that would open perspectives very interesting for me providing ways to witness how ‘code’ and bio cybernetic beings evolve in a social system with the particularities of SL. In a more modest scale, yes an avatar of my avatar could make a great difference. On the other hand weather, for instance, is a great pro in SL, despite of one being able to experiment different seasons and times, like snowy Winter and warm Summers, Rain and Thunders, still is of great benefit and affective reward, not being concerned about natural detractors and synchrony ‘noise’. Those condition in SL are rewarding to such extent that, even librarians would decide to dance while conferencing. Once again from my personal point of interest in digital aesthetics, I found relevant to this paragraph a mention made in “Assembling Collective Thought” project by Anna Munster and Andrew Murphie of an interesting conceptualization in Raymond Williams:
Second Life also allows for access to real world events. For example, the MacArthur Foundation announcement [...] Without traveling I was able to view the event in real time sitting with other avatars that could in turn be seen real time by the participants in the real world
• Anything that happens in real life can happen on Second Life
“To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement. (Dynamic Media. This is a piece originally published in Aminima - the great Spanish art journal: William James, Essays in Radical Experience:42)”
And of course not (thank god) not everything that happens in real life can happen on Second Life. If it would we probably start to dropping out our accounts, if we could reverse the equation (anything that happens in SL can be transducted to RL), all the panorama would become sexier.
• From, page 6Well Librarians, Designers Anthropologist, Media Analysts, Philosophers and any kind of intellectual and/or academic workers should contribute, ideally, to try to keep things more or less balanced against the astronomical proliferation of malls, night clubs and sex related ‘industries’ within SL yes you can lol. “Librarians are providing programming in the form of book talks, art exhibitions, meetings for professional development, and opportunities for networking.” (p. 7)
Second Life also allows users to replicate the sense of being in an important architectural site. Developers of Vassar Island have replicated the interior of the Sistine Chapel in order to give the faculty there an idea of the kinds of locations that can be portrayed on Second Life. [...] What are librarians doing in Second Life? {...} In some cases they are replicating traditional librarian services such as answering reference questions and pointing to collections of information. Librarians are also involved in adding to the cultural life of Second Life residents by providing programming in the way of book talks, story–telling events, art exhibitions, musical performances, etc.
• From, page 8 to 11
Some examples of libraries and library organizations in Second Life include McMasters University; Tufts University’s Tisch Library; ALA InfoIsland; and, the ICT Library. The Information & Communications Technology (ICT) Library run by the avatar Milo Czervic holds a collection tools for educators such as image viewers, scripts in the Linden Lab scripting language that can be used to make digital objects do things, etc. These items are generally very low cost and/or free to residents of Second Life.
• At, page 9
Librarians are also active on the Teen Grid. Teen Grid in Second Life is available to teens 13–17 years old
• AT, page 10
[...] librarians are also instrumental in setting up cultural events such as art exhibitions.
• At, page 11Ilene Frank show us clearly how relevant and influential can be the presence of library services and residents who are librarians in the mobilization of a rather critical higher cultural offer within virtual worlds like SL. One important aspect it's worth mentioning: the plasticity of the normal activities in SL and the relatively ease of use of their basic tool-set and processes, open room for people to aggregate and /or participate collectively in the construction and enhancement of knowledge through Library services in virtual worlds, whether they're acting inside or outside the limits of a more institutionalized support/budget. If the latter exists in a healthy way (so to speak), well that would not collision either, with a more indpendent/individualist ethos. Being centered, as I am, in the kind of practices, features and behaviours playing at the complex exchange of digital aesthetical practice, this particular point is strategic in the pursuit of an analysis about how artistic, academic and intellectual offer is being interpreted and conceptualize within Second Life.
Librarians continue to seek ways to market their services and develop tools which will help them answer reference questions from avatars. Interestingly some rules have been instituted to keep this reference area professional. Unless there is a meeting planned, it is possible to log on to the Information Island Archipelago and find few avatars. This is a criticism of Second Life in general. It can be difficult to run across others. Using the search tool to find events such as musical performances is one way to be sure to encounter other avatars.
• From, page 12 to 16
What else are we doing in Second Life at the University of South Florida? So far there has been a slow ramp–up of a USF presence in Second Life. We librarians had the permission of our Head of Reference/Instruction, Nancy Cunningham, who has a sense of humor and a willingness to give new things a try (my emphasis)
• At page 15
[...] here is one more aspect of Second Life that ought to be discussed: Second Life is fun. Is it ok to have fun? Some librarians presenting about Second Life are reluctant to talk about “fun” as a component of being a Second Life librarian or educator. I suppose this is a reflection on what our culture considers the nature of work. If we are having a good time, we can’t possibly be working. I would rather think that enjoying work is a plus. Working with colleagues in Second Life can be fun. [...] As mentioned earlier Second Life doesn’t have a great population density. I see more people crossing the street in front our university library than I may encounter in Second Life in the course of a day. At any given time there may be more than 50,000 avatars online, but they are spread out over what would be a large geographic area if Second Life were real–life real estate, it can be difficult to find others. [...] To conclude: Even though it may take some time and patience to explore Second Life, it is a worthwhile journey. Interest in virtual worlds is increasing and you will be ready when your users show up on Second Life needing help from a knowledgeable, 15 of 16 11/9/08 9:40 PM trust–worthy librarian.
• At page 16
A note: Second Life was mentioned by other presenters over the course of WebWise 2008. By the time I gave my talk it might have been considered superfluous. However I presented myself as someone who struggled to learn to use Second Life but found the struggle worthwhile and that seemed to strike a chord with some members of the audience. They also reacted to my age. I am obviously in my 60’s — gray hair and all. One member of the audience commented, “You made me feel better about Second Life, because I see that you are old. If you can do it, maybe I can do it too.”
I certainly can't go as long as it should here with this point, but I probably will be back to this subject in my next entry. The role of humour seems to be a great discovery for Mrs. Frank, in terms of a shared, enjoyable and yet! serious and productive activity if this is a direct outcome of the interface interaction and role behaviours in virtual world's playing, that is doubtful. However I think we should encompass this concept within a broader theory of Visualization, Design and Creativity, because, Sl is once again, the perfect field of experimentation for the unconventional characterization of those ‘gifts’ that people (perhaps Librarians in the eye of Mrs. Frank) very often (auto)edit or repress in themselves, because of insecurity, fear of peer judgment or basic shyness. Don't get me wrong, some of the most hilarious and imaginative people I know, in one end, and some of the most apathetic, dull and flat ones, share the same vocation/profession: librarians. Although I can extrapolate as well this same impression to the community of visual and New Media Artists, which I'm more familiar with. So, in my view, is not the inherent attribute of a community, and individual or a technology what it counts, but perhaps a combination of all of them what characterizes the bridging between play, fun, humour to intellectual productive labour.
At the end the relationship between creativity, skills, intellectual performance and humour must also—I think—being traced in a broader theoretical framework that range from Collective Thought to Aesthetic, Humour and Playfulness. For an interesting enhanced view on this, I invite you to check here the link to the article:
Wednesday, September 6, 2006
Ok now it's time to make a short break but I will be back soon to comment on Wagner James Au's article
From AU J. Wagner
• Highlight, page 1
On an innovation scale, Second Life suggested the potential for MMOs to also be a development platform for commercial, educational, and research projects
• Highlight, page 1
As broadband and high end PCs saturate the international market, it’s time to consider MMOs as the likeliest candidate for the Internet’s next generation, supplanting the two dimensional, semi–interactive portal of the Web for an immersive, three– dimensional, fully interactive Metaverse of data.
• Highlight, page 1
Unlike the Web revolution of the ’90s, documenting the emergence of online worlds is something that will be conducted from the inside, immersed within the media itself.
• Highlight, page 1
a new kind of journalistic ethics for a world where reality and identity are mutable and anonymity is both hazard and godsend.
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these worlds can help us understand the conflicts and values of our own material world
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To emphasize how crucial the need to understand this next dramatic shift for the Internet, the author offers five likely futures in which online worlds directly impact national and international politics and the global economy — a time when MMOs help decide the outcomes of real–world elections and influence long–established jurisprudence, while authoritarian government attempt to repress them, and they become the next theater for terrorist and counterterrorist infiltration.
• Highlight, page 1
anti–tax protest featuring tea crates and dancing rats
• Highlight, page 2
I’ve interviewed strippers and Catholic priests, combat veterans and peace activists, socialist utopians and midget warmongers. I’ve profiled entrepreneurs who own whole continents and earn six figure incomes from the buying and selling of virtual land, and a homeless hacker who built a virtual mansion while squatting in an abandoned building.
• Highlight, page 3
none of these events or persons really exist, except as data bits in a San Francisco server farm, they’re part of the best story I’ve ever been lucky enough to cover as a journalist. Because I’ve come to believe that it’s an inadvertent advance report on the future of the Internet, and how we’ll interact in it in decades to come.
• Highlight, page 3
The closest thing we have to the computer–created universe envisioned in Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, MMOs are persistent, self–contained Internet worlds that people across the globe simultaneously inhabit, through alter egos called avatars (from the Sanskrit for “incarnation”). The fantasy MMOs Worlds of Warcraft and the Lineage franchise of South Korea are two of the biggest, with well over 10 million users between them [2]
• Highlight, page 3
The worldwide growth of MMOs is one of the most misreported technology stories in recent years, pigeonholed as mere online entertainment when it is really the harbinger of the new global economy and culture, in ways that even noted thinkers like Thomas Friedman don’t understand
• Highlight, page 3
(In Friedman’s The World is Flat, he gives just passing mention of Asia’s computer game industry, and says nothing about MMOs. Just two points to suggest how great an oversight this is: in South Korea, an estimated one in twelve members of the entire population have played an MMO called Lineage [4]; in China, a whole cottage industry is devoted to “gold harvesting”, the acquisition of gold coins and other fictional money in MMOs [5].)
• Highlight, page 3
I visited the Linden Lab office for a demo of Second Life, I learned they didn’t want not me to write about their world, so much as write for it, as a journalist — an embedded journalist, as it were
• Highlight, page 4
From open oceans spring sailboats, submarines, and cruise ships; from the plains come racing tracks, clothing–optional nightclubs, and Resident–made games of all size and style. From the mountains appears sprawling, Frank Lloyd Wright–style homes, tree villages, and heavily–armed World War II fortresses. In all this, there’s a distinct sense of an expanding wilderness being settled
• Highlight, page 4
But I began my beat just as major combat operations in Iraq were winding down, and the real–world conflict spurred a brutal culture war among the Residents. At the time, the regions where player–versus–player combat was allowed were separated from the rest of the continent by an imposing, Cold War–era wall.
• Highlight, page 4
On one side were the Residents who enjoyed combat– oriented mayhem, and they tended to support going to war with Saddam’s Iraq (many were veterans or active–duty military); on the wall’s opposite side were a loose contingent of antiwar advocates, many of them artists and dreamers who see Second Life as a creative palette
• Highlight, page 5
As I write this in mid–November 2005, WoW boasts 4.5 million subscribers around the globe — 1.5 million in China alone [7]. To be on a World of Warcraft server is to share the same virtual space with thousands of people from over a dozen countries, living a lucid dream of adventure and heroism.
• Highlight, page 5
my colleague Cory Ondrejka recently dubbed WoW “the new golf”, considering all the informal get–togethers business and academic colleagues have within it, preferring their shop talk with broadswords and chain mail, than nine irons and plaid pants [9].
• Highlight, page 6
Many of these projects capitalize on academic research that seems to validate the sense people familiar with MMOs already grasp intuitively: the experience of one’s alter ego being in an immersive space is experientially different from any other kind of Net–mediated interface that has come before it. Different, and in several key ways, better, than the limited, distanced, largely asynchronous interactivity of the Web as it exists now. An MMO quite literally offers a direct pathway into data, and global collaboration with an international community through avatars that afford each individual a high degree of anonymity, and paradoxically, an equally high degree of self–representation. With so much potential, and the technical/commercial infrastructure in place to make it feasible, it’s difficult to imagine online worlds not becoming the next real leap in the Internet’s evolution.
• Highlight, page 6
If in a few short years online worlds become synonymous with the Internet, it’ll large be because it’s what we want it become.
• Highlight, page 6
“Torley Torgeson” turns the SL 6 of 14 11/9/08 9:36 PM experience into a uniquely personal (and uniquely lovable) journey full of Joyceian digressions and watermelons; “Urizenus Sklaar” and “Walker Spaight” cheekily treat it as tabloid fodder, including gossip and soft–core Page Six avatar cheesecake — while also conducting field research for freelance stories in the New York Times, and preparing for an upcoming book based on their blog. There’s a journal devoted to artificial life in an artificial world and there’s a journal on the internal voting system. With the appearance of every quality SL blog, I feel not the pull of competition but a quiet sense of relief; my beat was hard enough when the world had the population of a small town, let alone the size of a small city. (As of February 5, 2006, total population stands well over 130,000.) [16] Au http://www.uic.edu.proxy2.lib.uwo.ca:2048/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/ind...
• Highlight, page 7
experience into a uniquely personal (and uniquely lovable) journey full of Joyceian digressions and watermelons; “Urizenus Sklaar” and “Walker Spaight” cheekily treat it as tabloid fodder, including gossip and soft–core Page Six avatar cheesecake — while also conducting field research for freelance stories in the New York Times, and preparing for an upcoming book based on their blog. There’s a journal devoted to artificial life in an artificial world and there’s a journal on the internal voting system. With the appearance of every quality SL blog, I feel not the pull of competition but a quiet sense of relief; my beat was hard enough when the world had the population of a small town, let alone the size of a small city. (As of February 5, 2006, total population stands well over 130,000.) [16]
• Highlight, page 7
Of course, the subject matter is most immediately appealing to technophiles and gamers, but that’s really just the surface material. I am talking about seeing the citizens of online worlds as a cross–section of the world itself. I am talking about online worlds as a transmission space for “hard” news, first page material on subjects that have enormous and widespread impact on the global community.
• Highlight, page 8
Here, the potential for MMOs as a journalistic resource is even greater in the larger fantastical worlds. In Second Life, it’s typical for an avatar to be a stylized version of what a person looks like in real life; in the past, some Residents have been reluctant to reveal aspects of their first lives for that very reason. Men and women with hard stories to relate may be able to better speak the deepest truths of their lives through the maw of a hobgoblin.
• Highlight, page 8
a need that goes way beyond the assumption that online worlds are the next Web. They speak to the reality of online worlds as a model for our own, a collectively shared and collaboratively created thought experiment, or something resembling the parables of magic rings, dungeons, and eternal cities that Plato spun out for his students to help them discern the real principles of right action through the filter of the fantastic.
• Highlight, page 8
Missed opportunities like this speak to a n
• Highlight, page 8
There is so much to learn. MMOs can teach us things about the real role of gender and sexuality when hearts are engaged, before bodies [23]; or the expectations of race, when that quality is no longer skin deep [24]. There’s things to learn about how spirituality survives in a post–belief, hedonistic society [25], or how a new world can alter the prejudices of national identity [26].
• Box, page 8
There is so much to learn. MMOs can teach us things about the real role of gender and sexuality when hearts are engaged, before bodies [23]; or the expectations of race, when that quality is no longer skin deep [24]. There’s things to learn about how spirituality survives in a post–belief, hedonistic society [25], or how a new world can alter the prejudices of national identity [26].
• Highlight, page 8
Having a history in common builds and sustains a community — which in naked terms, keeps paying customers around longer, while encouraging new ones to immigrate. In return, the rest of us gain another resource for insights into the essential human condition when it’s made digital.
• Highlight, page 9
What does a reporter do when he finally has a direct, absolute means for knowing the truth of things? (Ontological fact checking?)
• Highlight, page 9
a pomo axiom on the order of “real life and the virtual are indistinguishable in meaning”
• Highlight, page 9
This principle really began with Linden Lab’s Terms of Service rules for Second Life, which forbid revealing real life personal details of any Resident without their consent. In the course of reporting, I began to see the value of maintaining this confidentiality — never mentioning real names of Residents, or even where they lived, saying “the West Coast” instead of “Los Angeles,” for example. A Resident confident that their real life won’t be unveiled by me is a Resident free to talk openly, perhaps for the first time with anyone.
• Box, page 11
1 — An E.U. or U.S. court fully deliberates on a virtual property dispute within an online world Last year, several criminal cases provoked by ownership disputes within virtual worlds occurred in Asia, leading inevitably to a court’s ruling that enumerates some legal rights in this medium [32]. What is still forthcoming (but certainly imminent) is a civil suit brought by one subscriber against another, where the owner of the world is effectively a witness for either party (or both.) Foreseeing this very possibility, an established lawyer built a law office in Second Life this fall, a Greco–Roman affair with fountains, marble columns, and large books helpfully describing the terms of copyright, trademark, and patent throughout the G20 states. For now, her law office is an information resource and general advice center. But she is already forming plans on take on real clients that come to her in SL, looking for solutions — and real contracts to sign, and potentially, real torts to file [33]. 2 — A mainstream political party creates an official campaign headquarters in an online world I reported on an unofficial Second Life campaign headquarters to John F. Kerry a couple months before the last election, the work of a young Democratic activist who created the thing on her own, and ran it with as much diligence as a real life staffer for the Senator. (The anti–Kerry phalanx was also working diligently: days after the Kerry campaign HQ was in business, an equally energized Kerry opponent acquired building rights on neighboring land, and encircled the Senator’s platform with looming anti–Kerry billboards of the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” variety.) So the construction of the headquarters is feasible; all that remains is for MMOs to follow the trajectory of blogs, in this regards. It was unthinkable in 2000 that the major candidates would invest any amount of attention in Web logs run by amateur enthusiasts; by 2004, it was unthinkable to campaign without them. 3 — Authoritarian governments and terrorists recognize online worlds as having the potential to threaten or empower their interests As I write this, there are 59 Second Life Residents who log in from mainland China. Three are in Iran; twelve are in Saudi Arabia [34]. In late 2005, the Chinese government sought (and was granted) access to Yahoo’s e–mail servers, so they could track down the location of an anti–government message writer. The upshot was a dissident in jail [35]. As shocking a moral compromise as this was, it was not an unexpected one; the “Great Firewall of China” polices Web–based traffic moving across the country’s geographic region. As of this date, the firewall does not evidently block counterrevolutionary speech transmitted within online worlds. So far, Chinese authorities have not cracked down on political expression in MMOs (though they have imposed limits on play time, arguably an indirect abridgement of free speech.) With over a million paying Chinese subscribers in World of Warcraft alone, however, sheer numbers make it inevitable that some will soon directly test the limits of political expression there, too. Picture a solemn online memorial to the students killed at Tiananmen Square, convened by a few dozen survivors of the massacre (now tech workers in the enterprise zones) offering to their fallen comrades a procession of torches and prayers in Stormwind Castle [36]. There’s an even darker side to this. From what we can discern, the war on Islamist terrorists is largely a Net–based operation; face–to–face meetings among cell members of al–Qaeda and its many franchise operations are rare; rarer still the actual horrific attacks. The al–Qaeda operation is for the most part a virtual one, conducted in the intersection of encrypted cell phones, pagers, and most of all, the Web. On that trajectory, the obvious next step is for them to plan and organize with an MMO, especially those that allow some level of customer–created content. Especially since U.S. Homeland Security is already there, training to prepare for their next attack. What better way to explore strategies, simulate their execution, all the while studying the weaknesses of the enemy? [37] When this happens, the next plausible scenario is a sudden influx of Feds and international legal authorities joining the MMO in question. And just as likely (and I’m indebted to Cory Ondrejka for this speculation), subscribers will form anti–terrorist coalitions, and conduct genuine counter–strikes in the form of “white hat” griefing against them. A battle against terrorism conducted from entirely within an online world. This was once just a scenario for a science fiction novel, but by now, the time to be astounded is long past.
• Highlight, page 11
Picture a solemn online memorial to the students killed at Tiananmen Square, convened by a few dozen survivors of the massacre (now tech workers in the enterprise zones) offering to their fallen comrades a procession of torches and prayers in Stormwind Castle [36].
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