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 August 24th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media, Technology
Have you been having problems getting SecondLife sound into your mac? It may be your audio settings in the sound preferences.
The solution has been posted by Barry on the Global Media Initiative blog
– Open the program Audio MIDI Setup [it’s in the Utilities folder in Applications].
– Change the audio output from 96000 to 44100.
– Restart Second Life
And Voila! you can hear yourself fly (and talk and listen to the birds and waterfalls..)
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on August 19th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media, Theory
I think it’s timely to revisit Wittgenstein – the early and the late – it terms of how do his views stand up in respect of new media and new media literacies.
“The world is all that is the case – the world is the totality of facts not of things”
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”
Here in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein is setting out an extension of the phenomenological understanding of the world – ie as it presents itself to us – as a function of concepts, perhaps not independent of ‘world stuff’, but constrained by our understanding of that which presents itself to our senses.
In the later Philosophical Investigations (16 years after the Tractatus) Wittgenstein extends his views to speak of language in context and of non-linguistic thought and raises the question of the possibility of a private language, or a pre-linguistic one. “If I draw a person what do I mean by it?” At what point is meaning present? and is ‘meaning’ the same as ‘thought’?”
At this point, Wittgenstein acknowledges that one can mean without verbal language – that even an air-drawing may signify a person, and so he continues to problematise aspects of language as only one of many signifying systems. Moreover he speaks of the problem of perception and that what may be intended may not be what is conveyed – for example by the ambiguous drawing of a duck-rabbit – sometimes seen as one or the other – often depending on context – ie if pictured with a field of rabbits we see a rabbit, but if in a pond of ducks we see the duck. So he is identifying the limits of language – notably that each person’s experience causes them to comprehend something a little different from the same utterance as that of another.
In this sense, Wittgenstein is also acknowledging Saussure’s view that the assignation of meaning to signs in language is arbitrary.
Perhaps this underlines the importance of even the limited gestures available in SecondLife and other virtual worlds.
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Posted by Jerry on August 12th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Technology
Years of playing the violin have shaped the ends of the fingers on my left hand. My beard grows slightly thinner where the chin-rest has interfaced with my head and there is a fairly permanent red mark where the shoulder-rest meets the front of my shoulder. And I have retained a high degree of upper-body flexibility as a result. The finger-memory – the body trained over years to land each finger precisely within a tenth of a millimetre enables sounds to be reproduced at the right pitch, and the wrist ensures that at whatever speed, the bow tracks (mostly) straight across the strings. So my body has adapted to the technology.
I still trim my fingernails to interface with technology – both hands to avoid the nail tapping on the keyboard of the computer, the thumb nails just slightly longer to facilitate texting on my phone.
Finger-memory again on the keyboard enables me to type faster than I write (by just a fraction), and perhaps others train their thumb positions for texting.
We wear our clothes in more ways than one – our feet being shaped to the shoes while in turn shaping our shoes.
How much do we shape our body to the technology, rather than the technology to the body?
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Posted by Jerry on August 10th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media, Technology
The New York Times Home and Garden Section has an article on SecondLife homes and gardens, profiling several ‘builders’ and ‘gardeners’ – this is a good change in the media from sensationalist pieces about sex, griefers and terrorists and is starting to bring the old media discussion back to where the majority are in SecondLife.
That is, using SL to build the house of their dreams and playing out harmless fantasies that are not too dissimilar from real life – but without the cold wind or the wet holidays.
So bouquets to the New York Times for bringing the discussion back to the reality of virtuality.
Cheers
Jerry
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