Jumping Back To The Past... A Little...

I just had in interesting experience and thought I'd take a couple of minutes to share it...

It's a bit convoluted though, lol...

Okay, I'm at work listening to Chris Anderson's audiobook FREE: The Future of a Radical Price here at work. (The 3 links above are (1) to Anderson's very thought-provoking blog, (2) a free copy of the audiobook from Audible.com (you can also get it, for free, at iTunes) and (3) a copy of the book you can read online, for free.)

Mr. Anderson is explaining (in the book, that is) that in this new economy, reputation is a commodity in the web-based economy of Information. I'm not going to do this justice but, over-simplistically, Anderson is explaining that if someone Googles a subject, and one of your sites comes up in one of Google Search's top positions, that's because a relatively high number of people are looking at your site, therefor creating a kind of reputation value. (Think of your local news: If there's a particular weather person whose forecasts you trust, you make an effort to watch that person's weather segment because you value his/her reputation as a weather forecaster.) (I warned you I wasn't going to do Mr. Anderson justice, lol.)

Just out of curiosity, I Googled myself. (I'm all alone at work here, so I was Googling myself in relative privacy. I generally try to not Google myself in public; as, I'm sure, we all do.)

If you're curious, my reputation doesn't seem to carry a great deal of value.

BUT...

I stumbled upon this blog entry, which I thought raised some interesting questions...

To summarize, the entry consists of 3 paragraphs that introduce the concept of SecondLife in general, introduces me as a half-hearted case study specifically, and then makes the simplistic conclusion that participation in a virtual reality can't be healthy.

Now, it's not my intention to disrespect the author or disreguard her opinion. But judging from 2 of the 4 comments left by other people (the first one is her apoligizing for a faulty link, which I don't believe was her fault since I work at the TV station that posted the link, lol), AND including a similar opinion voiced by my friend Tommy, who introduced me to SecondLife back in 2006, I think there is some interesting academic territory left unexplored here.

This got my wheels turning because it's now 2 1/2 years after the blog entry was written and I have perspective that I couldn't have had when the entry went online. I can actually consider the issues mentioned with some degree of objectivity...

The biggest theme expressed here is the concern that too much time in a virtual world must certainly be unhealthy. My friend Tommy expressed this concern after his involvement in SL waned after a few months and Brian's and my interest was only growing.

To me, this seems an odd assumption to make. Why must involvement in a virtual world necessarily lead to abnormalities in one's perception of reality? (I could simply use the term "a schizophrenic break" but most people (mistakenly) believe schizophrenia is synonymous with the condition known as Multiple Personality Disorder. So instead of wasting your time explaining the difference, I'm wasting your time explaining why I didn't simply use the clinical term for the condition, lol.)

I can't see the throughline in that logic. Model trains are a time-consuming hobby that creates a virtual world, but I've never heard concerns that the men and women who spend the majority of their free time and money constructing these aesthetic marvels might have difficulty separating the virtual world from the real one. I've never read or heard an urban legend about members of a reenactment society confusing which century they are in and chasing folks down the street with their muskets or rapiers, lol.

So why would SL be so troubling?

First, I think it's a generational thing.

In the early '80s, Dungeons & Dragons came into the popular consciousness. It was the first, or one of the first, games to be described as a "Role Playing Game". (Nowadays the term RPG is common, but in the 1980s is was exotic and strange.) And I'm no sociologist, but I would guess that the term might have something to do with the urban legends that sprang up around a specific kid who went missing, and it was presumed to be because of the game. There was a made-fo-TV movie about it in 1982 starring a then-unkown Tom Hanks, so anyone who hadn't read/seen the erroneous news reports that created the urban legends were introduced to the "dangers" of role playing games when the movie aired.

I believe this created a pop perception that somehow role playing games held some secret power that could unbalance and otherwise reasonably balanced mental/emotional state.

I can -- again, thinking of this as a generational phenomenon -- understand how that perception could arrise considering what my generation grew up believing about hypnosis.

Hypnosis is, plainly and simply, a state of deep relaxation. It's not a dream state, as 1970/1980s TV shows and movies might have us believe, and it's not even a state of semi-consciousness. I'm talking about therapuetic (one might say "legitimate") hypnosis, the type of hypnosis that performed by certified therapists in the medical field and not the performance variety wherein people do things against their will or without their knowledge. No one can be hypnotized without their own willing participation. That is to say that the hypnotherapist can only guide you into a hypnotic state (the term itself sounds, to my generation, more mystical and amazing than it actually is) and it's up to you to become hypnotized, if you will.

Example: Have you ever driven half an hour to get somewhere, lost in thought or conversation or the radio, and when you arrive at your destination you suddenly wonder where the time went and how you got there so fast? You were hypnotized. You were in a hypnotic state, and you put yourself there without even realizing it, lol.

But we grew up with the stage magicians who did these wild things with hypnosis (Right before our very eyes! *gasp*) following some sort of preamble proclaiming the amazing things that hypnosis can accomplish. We grew up, in short, associating hypnosis with "magic".

So the thought that a game that requires its players to use their imagination for hours might unbalance us seems, in this context, almost logical. (Almost.) And yet when we were young, impressionable children we played some form of Make Believe all the time without loosing our grasp on reality.

How did we ever make it out of the '80s alive?!! ;P

Secondly, I think the term "virtual reality" itself developed -- for people of a certain age and older -- it's own "magical" perception.

Look at movies like Tron, Strange Days and The Lawn Mower Man... Before people really knew what computers were and what they could do, folks (mostly writers of fiction) theorized wildly about the possibilities of a world created inside computers that was indistinguishable from our own.

In fact, that's one of the things that fascinated (and still fascinates) me about SecondLife...

I grew up with these concepts, which were largely concerned with methods of deceiving the physical senses to achieve the illusion of the virtual reality. We -- Western Civilization, at least -- think of the world from the outside in. In other words, what is external to us (what we see, hear, smell, can tough, can taste) is real. What is internal (emotions, perceptions of self/others) is not real, it's subjective, and therefor subject to suspicion.

The surprising -- and most informative -- aspect of the SL experience turned out to be (a) how far-off the sci-fi writers were when a virtual world finally presented itself (not that they won't be proven prophetic sometime in the distant future, but it won't be in my lifetime, surely) and (b) how deeply impactful the internal, subjective experiences can be to the human experience.

If you go sky diving in SL, there's no way you're going to feel the thrill/fear/exhilaration of sky diving for real. But if the avatar of someone you respect says you're a sweet guy, you might actually walk with a little bit of a spring in your step the next day, lol.

And let's be clear, I was deep into SL, lol. If it were possible to get lost in that world, I probably would have been the person to suffer a schizophrenic break and forget which one was the real world, lol. Except, you know... I wasn't strung out on hallucinogens and hearing voices and stuff at the time. ;P (Actually, the kid the movie Mazes & Monsters was based on was abusing drugs, suicidally depressed and he still didn't thing he was living in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, lol.)

But the thing is, you really can't "get lost" in that world. Just like you can't be hypnotized and convinced you're a chicken, lol. It's simply not possible. The human mind doesn't work that way. Our grip on reality isn't that fragile.

However...

...and this is what interested me when I happened upon this blog entry from 2 years ago...

...the question of what "reality" is should be further explored by all of us, I think! :D

And SecondLife actually did help open me up to this concept, but only after years of studying the Tao Te Ching, buddhism and Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do...

A person's subjective reality really is their reality.

I'm a young and dumb teenager, I'm in a car full of my friends and my girlfriend, and the car runs out of gas. We're 2 or 3 blocks away from a gas station, so we get out and walk. My friends and I are laughing and enjoying the conversation when my girlfriend starts yelling at me. She's pissed off. How could I be so stupid as to not pay attention to the gas gage?! Why don't I care about her?! Are my friends more important to me than she is?!

Wha...?!

Now, at that age I just thought she was being a bitch and wondered why she had to ruin my night.

But now I can look back and understand where she was coming from, and even see what the hell she was talking about. My friends were having a good time, she was miserable, and I was, apparently, fine as long as my friends were fine. The woman I claimed to love was miserable: If I actually cared about her, why wasn't I sympathetic to her needs? In fact, I was laughing and having fun, and I wasn't even aware that she was unhappy until she voiced it!

I'm not proud of who I was as a teen.

But more informative was the perspective I gain when I remove myself from both sides of that particular conflict: Two people having the exact same external experience, and yet opposite internal experiences!

Empirically speaking, that shouldn't even be possible! You drop a rock, it falls. That's science. That's objective. Your car runs out of gas, you have to walk 2 or 3 blocks to refuel it...

Hmph...

Actually, the specific train of thought that made me want to revisit my adventures in SL has to do with being a rock star.

My Genius Friend Dave has met and known rock stars in his day, and did you know that not all of them are living the Rock Star life? Some of them complain about how little studio work pays. Some are complaining about the taxes. Some of them enjoy arguing with their kids and running errands with their spouses when they're not up on stage having groupies scream their name and throw thongs at them.

But if you're a rock star, how can you not feel like a Rock Star?

I believe it's all in the moments.

I think life is made up of moments, and what life we live is actually made up of the moments we identify with.

Example:

I remember my childhood as being full of freedom and non-stop fun. I can sometimes be heard to bemoan the loss of summer vacation and endless play time.

But those are false memories.

I mean, there certainly were moments -- entire days/weeks -- filled with unbridled play and incessant movie-watching! But if I think about my whole childhood, I remember that those times were the minority, not the majority. In fact, I probably spend more time now -- as an adult -- writing stories, researching and investigating the paranormal, watching movies, reading novels, laughing with my friends (in other words "playing") than I did when I didn't have to pay the bills and wash the dishes.

Seriously, if I had perfect memory and compared the time I spend "playing" now to the time I spent playing as a child, I'll bet I'm having tons more fun than I realize I am, lol!

But unconsciously, I often identify with the moments of commuting or buying money orders for rent or forcing myself to go to sleep because it's "bedtime" and call those my Adult Life, while unconsciously omitting being forced to go to bed at a certain time, doing homework, not being able to buy a toy because my allowance wasn't enough (well, that hasn't changed all that much, lol) and calling the memories summer vacation my Childhood.

But it doesn't have to be like that. I have the choice.

So what the hell is this "reality" thing, anyway?

;P