You can’t always get what you want

I learnt a valuable lesson yesterday. Make sure everything is saved in at least two different places. My dear laptop crashed – and took everything with it. Including my blog draft. I’m going to have to wing it, so bear with me.

I would love to give you a first-hand account of my Second Life (SL) experience, but alas. After two attempts at getting it up and running, I gave up. At first I tried to download it onto a computer I knew was better than my little Fujitsu. Installation and registration was fine. And then it came to choosing a name.

I must have tried about twenty names for my female character, and all of the cool ones were taken. For those of you who don’t know how SL works, you get to live your “second life” online – choosing a name for yourself, and a new image (an avatar). You have the freedom to do whatever you like – and you can even charge “Linden dollars” to your very real credit card in order to buy things. 

At the end of March, over 13 million people were registered residents of SL – and each has to have their own individual name. You can type in your first name of choice, and then have to select a surname from a prepared list. And some of these names are pretty weird.

So after beating my head against the desk for about half an hour, I managed to find a relatively cool, unisex name. Trouble is – 13 million other people want to have a relatively cool name too. So screw having a normal first name – if you want to have that, you’re most likely going to have to pick a surname that would have seen you beating to a pulp at breaktime in primary school. Sorry folks, thanks for playing.

Once I’d sorted out the name dilemma, it was time to choose where I wanted to land. On that first island, they said I could meet and interact with people, walk around, even fly if I wanted to. Fantastic, I thought! One of my major aspirations in life, after watching X-Men in my childhood, was to be able to fly like Rogue could in the cartoons. Fortunately for Rogue, she didn’t get an error message saying that they couldn’t pick up her network connection.

So I crawled under the desk to check the network cable, disabled the firewall and the antivirus, chickened out and re-enabled the antivirus. And so ended part one.

Then I tried to get it on my laptop – and SL sniggered in its sleeve at my puny machine. See, SL wasn’t designed for people with computers like mine.  If you don’t have at least the recommended (recommended, not minimum) graphics card, SL jerks and shakes until you quit out of pure nausea.

But despite the admin issues, SL is hugely popular. A number of universities have a SL presence, where you can take classes. The Maldives were the first to open an embassy in SL on “Democracy Island”, and were swiftly followed by Sweden and Estonia . 20^th Century Fox premiered X-Men: The Last Stand on SL. Reuters has a news bureau. Sky News has a virtual newsroom. Mazda  and Toyota offer virtual replicas of their cars. It’s bizarre, I tell you.

I think it’s the escapism. I think it’s the way you can make up for your past mistakes, and be able to turn over a new leaf and go “this time, I know what to do”. I think that now, but I don’t know. This is only the beginning of my exploration into SL – setting the stage for what is to come.  One virtual step at a time.

Any Other Name

For some time I have been concerned with how people construct their identities on the web under forum nicknames and in chat rooms.

 

When I was 14, still socially awkward and slightly chubby, I delighted in logging on to chat rooms and chatting to strangers. I could be anyone I wanted to be – a tall, beautiful model, or a determined (still beautiful) university student doing medicine. I could abandon my shy, awkward self and hide behind the handle I had chosen.

 

While I grew out of this need to be somebody else on the net, I have a very close friend (let’s call him Tomas) who simply cannot. When I read his forum posts or his blog entries, I have no idea who he is. On forums, Tomas becomes arrogant, opinionated and aggressive. Over MSN (and away from face-to-face interaction) he becomes much more confident and more eloquent, hiding behind his heavily-Photoshopped emo-boy photographs. And although I’ve known him for years, I struggle to understand why he behaves like this online.

 

While I was doing readings on social media and networking, I came across a book by Marshall and Burnett, called Web Theory. In a chapter called “Webs of Identity”, they discussed exactly my concerns on the construction of people’s virtual personas.

 

One of the very postmodern claims they put forward is that the Internet provides people the opportunity to abandon the confines of the real self they have created, and assume another persona online. People can hide behind a mask of anonymity, and lead two different lives if they wish to.

 

This leads me to my second concern. If the web opens up an opportunity for you to become someone you’re not, does this not have an impact of the quality of your offline life? Tomas used to spend hours and hours on the internet – either chatting to people over MSN (that he never saw IRL) or posting on forums. He loved his confident online self, which eventually led to him becoming more confident online.

 

Now the academic jury is still out on whether or not the Internet has positive or negative effects on the user. It has been suggested that people send less time on their real-life relationships if they spend more time on the internet, and this is possibly quite true. If you hide behind your computer for 19 hours a day, your existing friendships will probably take a knock. However, people seem to overlook the fact that fantastic friendships are made online too.

 

My mother is addicted to Skype. While my father was ill, she would escape to her room and chat to her online friends. When he died, they were there to comfort her more than her so-called real friends, whose idea of consoling her was bringing crappy lasagne and a 12-page handbook on dealing with grief. She is now dating one of these people (or at least, that’s what her Facebook relationship status says).

 

But my point is that we cannot simply make a blanket judgement saying “Spending time chatting to people on the net is bad”. Instead, we need to look at how your Internet usage has changed your life – is it for the better, or for the worse? Can you carry those changes over to your real life? And what about how you interact with people, and how they interact with you? As Marshall and Burnett suggest, it is the quality of the interaction that is important, not the time you spend online.

 

Tune in next week for: My SecondLife experience, and why it’s so damn hard to choose a name that doesn’t make you sound like an exotic fruit basket.