Posted by Jerry on October 9th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media, Technology, Writing
That was the question posed by Slovenian virtual world expert Alja Sulčič. The dilemma is that most readers of commentary on virtual worlds are native English speakers, but with English as a second language, there is always the issue of whether something has been expressed poorly or simplistically due to limitations of vocabulary.
That’s certainly something Alja doesn’t have to worry about as her English is as good as most native speakers – but here she has an advantage insofar as she is able to think in more than one language – potentially increasing the available structural metaphors and moving beyond what ‘goes without saying’.
For that reason I try not to restrict myself purely to English language websites – I have a very little French language and try to extend myself there, but also I use machine language translation tools, like Alta Vista’s Babelfish – imperfect, but then I try to interpret beyond the words into what were the key concepts the writer was seeking to express. And that is an amazingly useful thing to do because the translations make me see my own language in new ways, such as where different root morphemes have led to different terms for things.
An example is the French word for computer – ‘ordinateur’ – think of roots of English words like ‘coordinate’ – and suddenly you have a picture, not of a calculator (from counting stones) but of a bringing together, or juxtaposing – which is a more accurate description from user’s perspective of, for example the results of internet searches.
In short, I recognise the dilemma but urge writers using English as their second language to keep writing in English, but also to write in their own language too – as that serves to extend the expressive power of the internet, cuts across the hegemony of English and demonstrates the remarkable gift that some people have of being able to think in two or more languages – thus extending the thinks you can think!
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Posted by Jerry on August 26th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media, Writing
I was about to log out when I received an announcement of a literary group meeting hosted by Morrhys Graysmark and Ina Centaur of the biennial literary magazine Sliterary Stories of Fiction and Second Life. I arrived not long after the session started and was welcomed and invited to take a seat (with the choice of seat or mushroom to sit on – and I was warned that the mushrooms make one brood). I risked it anyhow. What followed was a spirited discussion on the kinds of literature being produced in SecondLife – ranging from romances to thrillers, poetry to dramatic scripts. There was discussion of the merits of linear and ‘choose your own adventure’-styles.
And like any serious literary group there were offers of collaboration and critique exchanges.
The three-person editorial board – which includes RL journalists – decides on the merits of submissions to be included (or rejected) and, unusually for SL, offers RL rates for SL fiction. The focus is on fiction themed on SecondLife or on the crossover between secondlife and real life. The fiction is then published both in-world and on the web with each edition attracting in the order of 1000 downloads from the website and about the same in SecondLife. So it has a good circulation for a literary magazine.
Many of the participants are published authors in their own right. And the quality of writing is excellent – the fiction of the metaverse!
Who knows? perhaps I’ll send in a piece to test the waters for a more extended piece of fiction – but the deadline is very soon. In any event I’m looking forward to seeing the next issue 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on July 29th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media, Technology, Writing
BlogHer07 Conference is one of the biggest RL blogging conferences to date, and one of the first to deal with non-SecondLife issues with a significant SecondLife participation. The real-life (RL) part of the conference is taking place in Chicago USA with about 750-800 attendees in Chicago and an unknown number of SecondLife and WWW international attendees. SL participants had the advantage of being able to interact directly with the speakers via instant message – over those just watching the live video stream on SLCN.tv on the world wide web.
Speakers last night included:
This was a fairly free-ranging discussion among the panelists, and the discussion was streamed by live video into SecondLife.
Blogs and news media
Some key points included:
a discussion of whether blogs had moved beyond the ‘echo-chamber’ effect of the blogosphere – in which bloggers were essentially talking to themselves about themselves.
There was broad agreement that blogs are now part of mainstream media – breaking news often as rapidly as mainstream media channels.
There is no longer a single blogosphere – some blogs have remained inward looking, while others are more outward focussed – there is no longer a single mode of blogging (if there ever was). And there is a large expansion currently underway in new media of all kinds – flickr for photos, podcasting, YouTube, Facebook Twitter and others.
All of which could be argued to have arisen from Maslow’s basic needs hierarchy – notably the need to communicate. The internet has developed/evolved a very wide range by which people can find communities of common interest. One symptom of this that has been picked up and taken out of proportion is the capacity for such communities of interest to include a focus on physical aspects of representation – including pornography – and this goes back to a basic need for self expression.
Is blogging weird and elitist? Or is it more like literacy? – becoming increasingly an essential aspect of how people relate to each other. Certainly there are things that are more elitist than blogging, and there are also elitist bloggers – as there are in other walks of life. But there is no doubting that online communities can be strong.
While the IT industry is increasingly credential-driven, self-taught geeks are still contributing greatly to the shape of new media technologies.
It is important for women to break into the technology industry. This is not a gender issue, however, because first and foremost, technology needs to be tailored for people. The problem is not one of women lacking a voice in technology, but getting people to learn to listen – everyone, male and female has a role to play in shaping technology.
And sometimes that takes a thick skin – you need to be a bit Aspergers-like to become desensitised to the emotional social cues that serve to exclude those less confident with the technology.
There is also a real need for new media literacy – it is important to know who owns the media you use, and this is often buried deep within terms of service agreements. It is important to read the fine print of your terms of service agreements on social sites as many require you effectively to sign over the rights of your content to them so it can be (re)-used as they see fit. But if you find clauses you don’t like – blog it. Spread the word – and do so in nice simple terms, like ‘never mind reading the whole thing, look at these two sentences in which you sign your life away’.
One speaker focussed on the ‘power of one’ – if you don’t like a feature, or if you would like to see a new feature implemented, then let the big players know. The first responder may not be equipped to deal with the issue – or even understand that there is one – but persevere up the food chain. People who build the new media do care what people think – it is the basis of their business.
Another speaker focussed on the ‘people power’ aspect of blogs, noting that ‘mesh’ networks a re really taking off in China, as the Chinese authorities’ power to act against a million small voices is very limited. Mesh networks are able to provide people with an alternate voice, to amend the messages being given by those in power.
SecondLife and News Media
It was noted that virtual world SecondLife is a real space with real people – so it’s not a game (pre-scripted and bounded) – but a real community. So news in SecondLife is real news.
SecondLife is about building networks of people across the globe and across timezones, with a common visual environment. But with the current old media hype about SecondLife many are coming into SecondLife that don’t ‘get it’ – that don’t understand the concept of social networking.
One presenter noted that most politicians just use SL to gain real life publicity – to demonstrate their connection with progressive youth culture.
Ironically the person credited with the conceptual basis for SecondLife, writer – William Gibson will be entering SecondLife to promote his new book, but he refuses interviews from in-world real journalists on the basis that he doesn’t want to promote SL as a vehicle for promoting his book. Perhaps his initial negative experience in coming into SL has helped to shape his attitude towards SL.
For real journalists in SecondLife there are both challenges and opportunities. One major challenge – common to all writers – is that remuneration is within a micro-economy. So reporters writing for SL media are paid (when they are paid at all) in the order of US$4-5 in real money. But they can earn between 10 and 40 times that writing for real life media.
But the fact that the avatars are driven by real people has enabled genuine voice-of-the-people interviews with those who would otherwise be severely subject to censorship in conventional media. And the emergence of voice as part of teh chat function means that genuine vox populi news has become more widely available.
In response to a question from Sharon (as Teal Etzel) on whether the panel viewed themselves as recording the early history of the emerging 3D web, and as archiving a significant moment for future historians, there was a mixed reaction.
Some new media sites were storing broadcast quality copies of podcasts for archival purposes. Others couldn’t see that history was in the making, or that SL was in any way a significant event/activity.
One view was that SL is like a village – with parochial interests and local interest for residents, but of no greater significance.
Another view was that yes it’s not the fact that SL inhabitants are ordinary people with ordinary lives, but that these ordinary people are in extraordinary circumstances, taking the trouble to learn a complex interface at the beta stage of its development – and on that basis, such people were indeed on the cutting edge of something new and emergent, and that will shape the future of the technology.
Overall the discussion was stimulating and SL has provided a unique opportunity to participate actively in a conference in Chicago, and to hear some world-class academics – while sitting at home in Australia 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 9th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Theory, Writing
French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard died on my birthday, aged 77. He leaves us with a question he himself posed in 2004 in a paper he presented at the European Graduate School in 2004:
… When the referent no longer exists, can we still speak of an image?
Where Roland Barthes spoke of language as a mediation of the real, Baudrillard realised that the mediation is what we have access to, not the thing itself – and irrespective of whether or not the thing itself was actual. The world is richer for his having been, and poorer for his departure.
Jean Baudrillard at the European Graduate School, 2004
I still think his short book Simulations 
was his best work.
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 8th, 2007 — Posted in History, Journal, New media, Technology, Theory, Writing
Plato, one of the first new media analysts was concerned about the then new technology of writing. And he understood the potential (and actual) pitfalls of this new operating system. The same has been true of all subsequent new technologies. Always there remains the need for a meta-helper – one who understands the new technology to help later adopters make full use of the new technology.
This wonderful skit on medieval helpdesk support to a new user switching from scrolls to folio books is truly one of the internet video classics!
There is a wonderful parable here that speaks to one of Plato’s greatest concerns with writing over face-to-face communication. And that is that when something is written you can no longer query it or interrogate it – a bit like the user manual in the video here.
Plato, writing between 411 and 406 BC in the Phaedrus noted five key concerns with new information technology:
- Education will suffer because it presents information rather than promoting thought
- Information security will be compromised
- Authorship will be difficult to authenticate;
- It will be nothing more than a shallow distraction, devoid of serious purpose; and
- people will stop interacting with real people.
Quite prescient really when you consider the many criticisms of the internet and with web 2.0. His objections were raised almost 2500 years ago, but remain true today, and form the basis for the key themes of almost any information technology seminar whether about censorship or eLaw or online banking or copyright.
In popular discourse, the internet is often presented as a dangerous and anarchic space. At the heart of the arguments against the internet lies the issue of authenticity.
The point is that virtual communities, like SecondLife, are real communities that exist in a virtual space. But people are still talking to people, albeit mediated by computers. It is no different from peopletalking on telephones, excpt that the interface is different.
In addition, the real/virtual distinction breaks down because human idiscourse is already mediated through language and social conventions – we can no longer harken back nostalgically to a ‘state of nature’.
There’s a lot more about this in chapter 9 of my book Virtual States, but there are elements here that will form the basis for my next book – more on that later.
Thanks to Angela Thomas for the YouTube link (though I haven’t yet figured out how to embed it properly into my self-hosted WordPress blog) *sigh*.
Cheers
Jerry
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