Identity In The Digital Age

Tackling the problems of identity in the digital age…

1. pgptag 8.19.07 / 9am

   Hi Anonymouse, this is Giulio. I left a couple of comments on the IEET blog, then got a WP account to comment here.

   Actually, as in my reply to Gwin on the IEET blog, I like immersionists very much. I just cannot accept their whining about others using the voice option and their frequent suggestions that it should be removed from SL.

   As I see things, having more options is always a good thing provided nobody is forced to use them.

   I respect and support your right not to use the voice option, and ask you to respect and support my right to use it. That simple.

   Some more thoughts that I will further elaborate in a blog.

   As a transhumanist I wish to leave all limits behind and agree 100% with “An older woman can assume the shape of a younger one, a man can change bodies into a woman’s body or vice-versa. A person can inhabit a body that is entirely non-human and become something so totally removed from being human that it stretches the imagination”. I look fwd to being able to do all that in reality.

   And I sympathize with those who wish to experiment in a VR world in the meantime. As I said I support all kinds of immersionist second lilestyle as long as my own second lifestyle, which is not that of an immersionist, is also supported.

   But come on! SL (today in 2007) does not offer anything like full immersion! It is on a computer screen, which means that my suspension of disbelief is broken as soon as I look off screen. I cannot feel virtual wind blowing on my face, and virtual sex gives no physical sensation whatsoever. So I cannot take seriously SL as an alternate reality. I can and do use SL as a communication platform and find it useful to interact with remote persons. Our business focus is developing collaborative environments in SL and other VR worlds.

   Of course: SL wil evolve, VR tech is evolving fast, and sooner or later we will be able to enter fully imemrsive VR environments. I really look forward to that and consider SL as a very useful baby step in that direction, but I am not able to take it seriously as another world until it offers full stimulation of all senses _very_ close to physical reality.

   In the meantime I support and respect all kinds of creative experimentation. I will never ask you to disclose and prove your RL identity (unless you want me to send you a check). I will never request that you use voice or paste your webcam feed on your avatar face (again, unless we are in a business situation). I will type to you if you do not wish to speak, and always respect your chosen second lifestyle. All I ask is that you also respect mine.
2. anonymouse1 8.19.07 / 4pm

   Giulio,

   Thank you for your response here, I appreciate it.

   You approached your article by doing exactly what most augementationists do, you:

   1) Railed against the people who don’t want to use voice even though there are a host of valid reasons not to (only a few listed in this article) and
   2) Claimed that anyone who doesn’t use it will exist in roll playing sims and will become second class citizens.

   You need to accept that, while some (like you) don’t consider it full immersion and “can’t take it seriously”… and, indeed, “consider it a phone call” some are willing to take what they can from it and accept what we *can* have here in 2007. Like you, I also look forward to the time when we can step into a VR “pod” and be fully in another universe.

   For the record, I have no problem with people using voice. What I am fighting against is the lack of tolerance for people who don’t want to use it and the bigotry that seems to be coming along with it and options like it.

   What also bothers me about it is that LL implemented it with very little sensitivity to anonymity or privacy. The implementation feels rushed and forced.

   LL implemented voice for two reasons:

   1) To stop There.com from being able to claim that they’re better than SL because there.com has voice options. SL was clearly superior because it has a free economy and because it’s build system is better among other reasons.
   2) For businesses like IBM and Microsoft to be able to have online “virtual” meetings. That is to say: a conference call.

   Also, they did it without even including the slightest way of masking your voice. That being said there are pieces of software that can do this which can be used in conjunction with SL, but, it would be nice to have it in the client for convenience. Also, some text to speech technologies might be useful for those who are mute and can’t speak or those who don’t care to use their RL voice even through a filter.

   Being a relatively new user of SL, I don’t expect you to understand that LL is terribly bad about not listening to it’s customers and has a long track record of implementing things badly. Case in point, since voice has been implemented, I’ve never seen more lag in more places. It’s not because of “new users”… it’s because of the burden that voice, the supposed lagless option, is putting on the system.

   Voice options have been available outside of SL for a long time and they are easy to get and use. SecondTalk was a popular way to talk to people for a long time. It uses a script and Skype: very very easy to get and set up even for the most ignorant user.

   I respect your second lifestyle and your choice to use SL as a phone call, like you said on your blog, but please don’t tell me you respect mine and then tell me that I’ll be relegated to the ranks of the second class and put into a ghetto/RP sim in the very same breath.

   Never forget that the so-called “first generation” built the world you’re now enjoying. SL is not built by LL, but by it’s residents. I very seriously doubt we’ll be disappearing overnight, if at all.

   All I ask is tolerance.

   Anony Mouse
   “The highest result of education is tolerance.” ~ Helen Keller
3. pgptag 8.19.07 / 6pm

   Hi - I do respect your second lifestyle.

   I do not want to “put anyone into a ghetto/RP sim”. As far as I am concerned, you are more than welcome to come to our sims and text-chat with us - you will find out that everyone there is respectful of those who do not want to talk. My point is that you people could be more comfortable in places where nobody speaks, and choose to spend most of your SL time there.

   I do not use voice when I am in a noisy RL environment and when I could disturb others in RL. That probably means I use text most of the time, but I am very happy to have the voice option available.

   I will elaborate more in a blog and let you know.

   Bye - G.
4. anonymouse1 8.19.07 / 7pm

   “My point is that you people could be more comfortable in places where nobody speaks, and choose to spend most of your SL time there.”

   I’m not sure if that’s necessarily true. I have no problem listening to other people. I do, however, have a problem when they try to pressure me to talk and accuse me of hiding something when I don’t use the feature.

   As long as that attitude isn’t the prevalent one, then I’m okay with a “mixed” environment.

   Sincerely,
   Anony Mouse
   “Live and let live.”
5. Sophrosyne Stenvaag 8.19.07 / 11pm

   Guilio -

   There’s one thing that concerns my in your first reply to anonymouse: your statement “I cannot take seriously SL as an alternate reality” is fine, and of course, you’re welcome to that opinion.

   But that view takes you *emotionally* someplace you’re willing to backtrack from *logically* when called on it. That statement you made tends toward “…and therefor I can’t take you or your concerns seriously either.”

   And that’s part of the bigoted-Augmentationist argument that anon. and I focus on: “it’s silly to role-play, to think you’re a furry or a robot [but not, of course, young, beautiful and white], so I’m justified in dismissing your concerns in the name of convenience and profit.”

   You’re wise enough not to go down that road, but your fellow travelers among the Augmentationists aren’t - and that’s what’s driven my and anonymouse’s reactions.
6. pgptag 8.20.07 / 6am

   Hi Sophrosyne,

   I cannot take seriously SL as an alternate reality because its technology is way too primitive for that.

   I have been in VR since more than 20 years, and have seen it all from the first text based MUDs to today’s quasi-videorealistic MMO technology. Seeing how fast this technology has developed in the last 2 decades, I can imagine fully immersive VR worlds sensorially indistinguishable from physical reality in 20 years (may be even much less). I will take those seriously as alternate realities. Even more when, perhaps in the 2nd half of the century, we will be able to move our consciousness to VR worlds as software being able to control our reality as we control SL today. I look fwd to furries being able to _be_ furries if that is what they want.

   What I take very seriously is the aspiration of people to something more and something better. I am also unable to take conventional religions seriously, but I take very seriously those who want to think that maybe there are more interesting games above and below everyday reality.

   I think we are really on the same page and I do not dismiss your concerns at all, but I still want the convenience of being able to use voice and webcam feeds in SL, because these are enabling technologies for some of the things that I want to do in SL, like
   http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/seminar_on_h_and_religion_in_sl/

   I think it is up to use to find a way for immersionists and augmentationists to coexist peacefully in SL. It will be a useful exercise to experiment with ways for people with different attitudes to coexist in RL, a trick that we have not mastered yet.
7. Gwyneth Llewelyn 8.22.07 / 2pm

   Hi Anony Mouse I guess that the whipped horse refuses to die although it’s pretty clear that Linden Lab will definitely not “remove” voice from SL.

   Giulio has in fact stated quite well the pro-voice group’s overall position with “My point is that you people could be more comfortable in places where nobody speaks, and choose to spend most of your SL time there.” That’s precisely the whole issue, isn’t it? One’s allowed to do whatever they please, just out of the sight of the mainstream. It’s those kinds of things that prompted me also to write on the dangers of segregationism, ghettos, and virtual apartheid
   .

   “Tolerance” is way more than “acceptance of existence” in the sense that you “tolerate” others who feel and think differently to have a right to exist, so long as they’re far away, hidden, invisible from sight. In fact, the “tolerance banner”, in this age and era, seems to be raised to mean something quire different than “peaceful co-existence”!

   Giulio, however, launches the true and ultimate challenge: “I think it is up to use to find a way for immersionists and augmentationists to coexist peacefully in SL.” Indeed. My argument is that while augmentationists can live perfectly in a world where anonymity is the default social norm and revealing yourself is optional, immersionists cannot live in a world (except in ghettos) where revealing your identity is the default social norm and anonymity is tolerated in ghettos. I agree that the “trick” of peaceful coexistence has not been mastered. However, an important point is that the question might simply be ignored. With 9 million accounts, the overwhelming majority are augmentationists anyway. With 90 million, there will be no immersionists left! So the question of “protecting a minority of immersionists” might simply disappear by sheer peer pressure, as time goes on. That’s the major reason why I personally abandoned the fight, when there simply might not be anything to fight for in a year or two. The purpose of the discussion is just to raise a bit of history on discrimination in virtual worlds. It might catch the attention of an academic or two to write a dissertation or a paper on it, and then be buried deep in stacks of academic literature.

   The other question is “how immersive is Second Life anyway?” This, I believe, is the same question we can ask of a book versus one of the latest Hollywood movies with tons of special effects and dramatically good directorship. Which is more real? Well, the notion of suspension of disbelief came from literature, not movies, and the whole concept of “immersion” was first described about books that make us cry, laugh, imagine landscapes, emotionally attach ourselves to the characters, and transport our minds to a different world. These days, such books are labelled “escapist literature”, while in the 19th century they were simply considered “pretty good writing”. However, labelled or not, “pretty good writers” are still publishing books

   “Immersion” is always something that happens in the mind. Some people laugh and cry when reading books; some do the same when watching TV; some, however, feel that all these technologies are too “narrow-bandwidth” to elicit “suspension of disbelief”. We all agree that only direct neural cortex input — where your brain cannot figure out if they’re getting information from your senses or from a machine exactly duplicating your senses — will provide “full immersion”. I think that’s unarguably. However, even for a transhumanist, there is a middle term — the brain only requires a bit of stimulation (which varies from person to person) to enter “immersion” really, the issue is that the required stimulation varies a lot from person to person. In fact, the TV and Xbox/Playstation generation requires far more stimulation than the “book generation”, since we were stimulated to enhance our imagination by, well, reading books. The “canned” format of the TV does not leave much time left for exercising our imagination any more…
8. Anony Mouse 8.22.07 / 10pm

   http://secondlife.com/newsletter/2007_08/letters.html

   The community has spoken.

   Anony Mouse
9. Anony Mouse 8.22.07 / 10pm

   Gwyn,

   Your arguments are pure sophistry.

   You extrapolate numbers where there is no proof.

   You assume that the number of immersionists will remain the same and that all future users will be augmentationists.

   I don’t bother to read your enormously long, dragged out postings because, frankly… You’re flat out wrong.

   Anony Mouse
10. Kath Brokken 8.23.07 / 2pm

    Anony, you skipped over one major drawback to switching to voice - people who are deaf, or who have only partial hearing. One of the best features of Second Life has always been its accessibility to people with disabilities. When the addition of features that depend on a full range of hearing, Linden Labs has begin to alienate a portion of their user base.

    How does this apply to Second Life being a step towards Transhumanism? I challenge anyone to show me ONE unified, immersive system that even comes close to the experience that Second Life provides AND that provides the same experience to someone in a wheelchair, someone who can’t hear, or someone with severe social anxiety as it does for someone without any disability. In second life, everyone is given an equal opportunity for as immersive an experience as they want. So not only is Linden Labs alienating a portion of their user base, but they’re also taking away from Second Life’s ability to provide an at least somewhat transhumanist experience.
11. Anony Mouse 8.23.07 / 2pm

    I completely agree with you.

    Thank you for adding this Kath, because it is an excellent point.

    *smiles*

    Anony
12. Giulio Prisco 8.24.07 / 4pm

    Come on Kath, how can adding extra options take anything away?

    Adding a new blade or tool to a swiss knife hardly decreases the usability of the other tools. Of course, a user can think that a specific blade or tool is useless, ugly, dangerous… and prefer not to use it. Same for voice in SL.

    If you come to our sims you will find out that we always respect non voice users. It often happens that even if only one person in a group does not have voice enabled, the others will switch to text. That is just basic politeness and good manners. I will always respect you right to live your way, if you respect my right to live my way.

    Transhumanism is about adding more and more options to life, and about self-ownership and free choice. Criticizing the lifestyle of others and their right to use or not to use an option, is not the transhumanist way.

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