I took the class because it was interdisciplinary and interesting - I really had no idea how it would relate to my research, if at all. That's good because in the last week of using SL I've found a whole bunch of things about it that I love that have very little to do with my research, like:
- "travel writing" -- I collected a few lists of "places to visit" and spent way too much time visiting different sights and writing notes on them. I would think doing some travel writing on different SL sights would be a blast.
- "the book experience" -- I'm kind of a book nerd, in the sense that I like the 'experience' of a book (that can't be found on the Web) so I was interested to see if/how the good ol' book would adapt to the SL world. I went to visit the SL Library and several book publishers. And, I visited a bunch of "bookstores" to see if anyone had managed to create that great "third place" feel of a good coffee house or old bookstore. (Or, err ... would that be "fourth place"? I get confused easily.)
- "snapshot aesthetics" -- I started taking snapshots early on and they were so bad I had to spend time learning the camera controls. Then I started wondering what qualifies as a good snapshot in SL.
- avatar creation -- To do some posed snapshots I started creating different avatar "roles/skins/???" to use as "models." Fooling with the sliders in different ways brought back lots of lessons on anatomy from art classes that I thought were lost forever. If I were a (professional) actor I think I would be thrilled at my ability to throw off physical constraints in the creation of a role.
Beyond the metaphysical questions I'm interested in SL as a technology of social connection, too. There are pieces of the "social network toolbox" built in to SL (ie profiles) - but how will this aspect of SL evolve, if at all? Could a future version of SL provide residents with the same sort of "uses and gratifications" that, say, MySpace does today for those who use it? If not, what about the experience of both is different?
So many questions, not enough avatars to find out the answers ...
1 comment:
Interesting that you mention "travel writing" because the guest that I have invited (virtually) to present to the class will talk among other things about "virtual tourism" which is an area picking up speed at the moment, since virtual worlds are now large and complex enough to merit that. A good area of research and development from the business point of view as well.
You mention "the book experience" as well. Much has been written about it (like Florian Brody's "The Medium is the Memory" in Peter Lunenfeld's "The Digital Dialectic", one of the recommended readings). In it he mentions a remark by Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT (who will be at the Davos forum), "My father used to say, 'I is written in the holy books.' Today we say, 'The computer tells us.'"
About your snapshots experience, well, that is pretty much like an amateur photographer getting to know his/her camera. I can tell you that there are excellent photographers in SL, as there are shows and exhibitions in galleries and such. I also found an old fashion photographer's studio with a set, lights and lots of costumes that you can try on for your picture. And the photos on the wall are terrific. Unfortunately I do not have the "bookmark"?, but no problemo, someone, perhaps you, will write a travelogue where that and other places are not only mentioned but photographed. Even more strange, the travelogue might come to exist in RL, bringing or spilling one world into the other, like the Borges tale in his extraordinary book Labyrinths, where he writes about the Emperor Chuang Tzu's dream: "...Chuang Tzu some twenty-four centuries ago, dreamt he was a butterfly and did not know, when he awoke, if he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamt he was a man"
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