CRDM 701

Week 9 - Kelly

I liked Hillis? discussion of escape. He points out that ?all too finite physical bodies are thought secondary to our minds and representational forms?a dynamic that is built in to virtual technologies? and then continues that ?all cultures facilitate this ?escape from the body and its needs and actions involving food, sex, and death.? I agree with this observation but I think it?s interesting how much of VE?s and games try to incorporate elements of the physical. A big part of the attraction to the Wii is extension of physical movement, death is maybe the most prevalent theme in games and we?ve mentioned before in class how people?s sexual persona is amplified in Second Life. The recent popularity of Larping is also interesting in this discussion. Since there is no audience the participants act out their fictional characters for their own enjoyment. What prompted this move from online role playing to physical meetings? Maybe this wish for a physical setting is partly because of a dissatisfaction with the way these worlds have been engineered. Like Hillis? discussion of the ARL world composed of ?light and almost entirely reliant on vision? (xxvi). The VE?s seem to neglect the other senses like with the ?aural icons? and the ?deauralization of space? (p. xxii). After our discussion on Ong, this kind of setting doesn?t seem very naturally attractive.

These cases and the cases presented throughout the all the readings provided great support for the Baudrillard simulacra discussion. This article really broadened my view of what can be considered a simulation?really most of postmodern culture. It?s interesting how he keeps referring to the ?death? of the real when Hillis mentions that this is part of the physical world we wish to escape. According to Baudrillard we not only escape the real world we kill it through simulation. His argument that simulations actually precede the real seemed hard to grasp at first but after reading his examples it isn?t hard to come up with others (actually quite easy). There are more discrete instances but the other day I drove a friend home and she mentioned that he neighbor ?didn?t have a job?. He pays his bills by playing online games and then selling his virtual money on ebay for ?real? money. He succeeded at completely escaping and the outside world was dead to him.

Another topic I hope we can discuss in class is the idea of the self in relation to the virtual environments. Wiley?s last theoretical challenge is for a ?more nuanced approach to the definition of the public, the private, and the self and to the politics of their articulation? (p. 86).  Hillis points out that the sense of self ?may in part be gained from the use of such electronically mediated technologies? and that ?the boundaries between the self and the technologies it uses to transcend this segmentation [among our human selves] begin to blur? (p. xxxiii). If our self is constituted by our ?language community? of which we are a part does this mean that the technology itself is part of that community? I think it is interesting in the maps we drew last week a lot of us included pictures of some kind of technology to describe the places that are important to us. Our maps seemed to represent the identity of our social space and by including a television (like I did) does that mean that technology helps compose my self? Beaudrillard and Hillis say that the distinction between the technology and our selves is blurred but I have to think about that more. At first I would argue that my identity is composed of the human interaction I receive through the technologies but then I guess how the interaction is mediated changes the information and in turn constitutes a different self.

Posted at 06:31PM Oct 24, 2007 by klnorris in General  |  Comments[0]