Immersive Effects: Communication and Second Life

“I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise, for the sake of cell phones and Jet Skis.” said George Carlin, an American social critic, who seemed to be experiencing frustration over a modern world that emphasised the adoption of advanced technological products in people's lives. He found some comfort not to blindly commit himself into a social life he did not want by declaring his detachment from the humanity realm.He explained his methods in his book, “Last Words” confessing that, although he knew he was still human, he would not identify himself with his species any longer-Not that he had abandoned his humanity, he just put it in a place that allowed his art to function free of entanglements(Carlin, Hendra, 2009, pg285).”

The way George Carlin appeared to have found his “home” to live his personal life, would it be the same manner in which people nowadays who make media their second life? How real the “life” would be in that sense? Before that, is there such a thing as “real life” anymore? Well, George Carlin gave a statement of “When you're born, you get a ticket to the freak show”(George Carlin Quote) has clearly indicated his antagonistic view that we are living in a fake world-a place he did not want to reside. Perhaps there is no “real life” anymore! Cultural theorists such as Umberto Eco believes that the reality that we are in is a "falsehood" which we enjoy in "fullness". Therefore, to attain the real thing, it must fabricate the absolute fake (Eco, pg8) because reality is just a fantasy (Eco, pg15). Eco explains that it is not the authenticity of a piece it counts but the amazing information it conveys that can improve the reality (Eco, pg15).

According to Ken Wilber, in the reality that we are in, we have come to the awareness that there are problems inherent in its own organisation and we have run up against our own limitations for a resolution. He explains that this is because the modern is struggling to give way to the postmodern and the the solution of this problem is perhaps the creation of a new one (Wilber, 1996, pg68). For that, Darren Tofts in his “the World Will Be Tiön”, displays that postmodenism deflects the idea of an absolute reality in favour of high fidelity facsimiles, suggesting that the movement from analogue to digital media is a vital event in the diminution of reality's a priori status (Tolfs, pg2). Probably, virtual world may take care of the safety for us to expose what we are missing so that we can begin to accept ourselves as what we really are (Turkle, 1995, pg 263).

For an example, imagine a man with a fattened nose, protruding tongue, upward slanting eyes, who, at birth, inherited Down Syndrome. What would his social life be? Activities like hanging out with friends, catching out some great movies in the cinema, engaging in a relationship and etc-all seem impracticable, at least to a certain sense, for this man to “really” take joy in. Thus, he chooses to involve himself in a virtual world, a genre of online community in the form of computer-based simulated environment where users can interact with each other (Bishop, 2009). Why would he do that? Perhaps, the moving factors he engages in virtual world is that he craves for “some changes” in a new environment which are hard to achieve in real life.

The Ecological Cognition Framework (ECF) developed by Bishop (2007a; 2007c) indicates five binary opposition forces that are “activated” when a change occurs in a person’s environment. They are: (1)social-antisocial, (2)creative-destructive, (3)order-chaos, (4)vengeance-forgiveness, and (5)existential-thanatotic. These are what that people are experiencing when online, things that provide stimuli and create impetuses for people to go online.To elaborate them, firstly, one may be extremely social when online, participating himself a lot perhaps in the forum discussions. Secondly, the new environment may have driven him to be more creative to solve problems and create contents. Also, being online may enable him to create an order in his life, where he carries out actions such as organising bookmarks and rearranging pages. Subsequently, perhaps he loves unleashing his vengeance by being aggressive online, conducting activities like flaming and posting negative feedback on other community members. The existential force would allow someone to exist in a different form such as being a dragon-slaying warrior in the virtual space of an online fantasy role-playing game. Undeniably, the emergence of identity fraud may also be the outcome of these factors where people would abuse them to commit crimes. Identity Fraud means the fraudulent use of an individual's identifying information to commit crimes, unlawfully establish credit accounts, secure loans, or enter into contracts. Identity fraud occurs when a criminal uses personal information, such as a Social Security Number or credit card account number, to steal financial resources (What is Identity Fraud?).

When many things are impossible in the real world, virtual world opens the gate to enable people out there in engaging activities that are very different from their everyday face-to-face interactions and experiences. Hence, more and more people are spending exorbitant amounts of time online as a normal part of everyday life: playing games, shopping, maintaining friendships via instant messenger and email, getting news, etc (Lee, Hoadley, 2006). To prove it, over 80% of the nation's teenagers go online -and many of them can scarcely remember what the world was like when people were not always connected (Pew Internet, 2005). Over 43% spend more than an hour per day online, and the majority of teens (57%) also prefer the Internet to the telephone (Brignall & Valley, 2005).

According to Turkle (1995), although the line of demarcation between reality and virtuality is increasingly blurred, people are comfortable with substituting representations of the reality for the real. And this is the problem-It is as though the overlap between real and virtual effectively causes no practical reasons to separate the two. In this case, it is essential to note the difference between immersion(representation) and interactivity(communication) to to rethink textuality, literary theory and the cognitive processing of texts in the light of the new modes of artistic world(so that in a way or two will assist us in the construction for a real, or otherwise better life virtually, hopefully).

Marie-Laure Ryan (1994) explains that immersion “depends on the vividness of the display where its factors are closely related to the devices that lead to realism in representation”. She points out that immersion has a need to project a three-dimensional picture, an effect where Steuer (81) marks as “depth of information”, which is a function of a resolution display(For example: the amount of data encoded in the transmission channel). Apart from that, the "breadth of information" proposed also by Steuer unravels immersion as "the number of sensory dimensions simultaneously presented." To elaborate, breadth of information is achieved through the collaboration of multiple media: image, sound, olfactory sign as well as though the use of technical devices allowing tactile sensations (81). On the other hand, Marie-Laure Ryan describes interactivity as “the power of the user to modify the environment”. Also, she indicates an important point that:

“When navigating the virtual world, we have to note that moving the sensors and enjoying freedom of movement do not in themselves ensure an interactive relation between a user and an environment: the user could derive his entire satisfaction from the exploration of the surrounding domain. He would be actively involved in the virtual world, but his actions would bear no lasting consequences.” (Ryan, 1994)

Thus, in a truly interactive system, two way communication has to be the virtual world must respond to to the user's actions. Importantly, when it comes to computer-generated virtual reality, we have to understand that there is nothing intrinsically incompatible between immersion and interactivity (Ryan ,1994). Just like in real life that the greater our freedom to act, the deeper our bond to the environment and hence, the more interactive a virtual world, the more immersive the experience(Ryan, 1994). Immersion and interactivity do not stand in conflict-or at least not necessarily. Immersion may offer an occasional threat to interactivity, but the converse does not hold. To illustrate the “threat”, following McLuhan, Steuer suggests that the vividness of a virtual world may "decrease a subject's ability to mindfully interact with it in real time" (Steuer, pg90). If a computer-generated environment is so rich in "fictional truths" that its exploration offers great rewards, why would the user bother to work on it?

In fact, there is a good reason for virtual reality to combine these 2 types of experiences. To explain, in the real world, we act with the body by pointing at things, manipulating them, and working on them with tools, using them as an instrument of exploration by walking around the world and moving the sensors. In virtual reality, we interact with a world that is experienced as existing autonomously because this world is accessible to many senses, particularly to the sense of touch. The bodily participation of the user in virtual reality can be termed world-creative in the same sense that performing actions in the real world can be said to create reality (Ryan, 1994). This occurs through the mediation of the body. "Our body is our interface," claims William Brickemp in a VR manifesto (quoted in Pimentel and Texeira, 1993, pg160). Therefore, the authenticity of virtual reality can be brought to a higher level of validity by reconciling immersion and interactivity because we are able to feel a greater sense of presence. The question to ponder now is whether engrossing ourselves into it bring more harm than good or the other way around?

Joshua Clover, in his “Edge of Construct” depicts digital immersion can be “bad”, that it becomes hard to discern one's true identity, resulting one to experience “an endless confusion of insides and outsides” (2004, pg28). In this case, Clover is suggesting a possible outcome of identity crisis, which in the philosophical sense has a great deal with the body-mind problems. Before asserting that the virtual reality is a place where one's identity belongs, we must accept that in the psychical real world, textual creation is also a creation ex nihilo that excludes the creator from the creation-a purely mental event where people do not belong to the world of their fictions! If a mind may conceive a world from the outside, a body always experiences it from the inside (Ryan 1994). As a relation involving the body, the interactivity of virtual reality immerses the user in a world already in place; as a process involving the mind, it turns the user's relation to this world into a creative membership. Therefore, rather than performing a creation through a diegetic (i.e. descriptive) use of language, we should take believe that the most immersive forms of textual interactivity are those in which the user's contributions where a dialogic and live interaction with other members in the community exist. In this case, perhaps virtual reality is the perfect reality to live out a true life (Ryan 1994).

A good instance of virtual reality is Second Life-a sophisticated, online 3D digital world that is populated by customisable onscreen characters called avatars who represent individual members (What is Second Life?). They perform routines like what we do in the physical world: meeting, interacting, playing, building, dating, and etc. Since buying and selling are possible in Second Life, this have caught the imagination of the Internet's heaviest hitters, who see it as the possible future of online commerce (What is Second Life?). Some insights about Second Life Economies:

“our users create, merchandise, and sell virtual goods as part of the largest user-generated 3D virtual goods economy in the world. By any measure - number of items, transactions, dollar value, revenues earned - Second Life is the leader. In 2009, Second Life Residents earned more than twice that amount - US$55 million- while the total size of the Second Life economy grew 65% to US$567 million.” (Linden, 2010)

Lastly, can we fall in love with avatars? Yes in future but not now. One of the reasons is because not all current users in the virtual world embrace the reality. Their attitude towards virtual avatars is comparable to Warner's discussion of 'the principle of negativity (Warner, 1990, pg42): “the process by which when one enters the public is to erase one’s private self (and rendering ethos, the persona of the speaker/writer, irrelevant) and assume a public mantle of anonymity so as to evoke a purely public figuration by which ‘arguments, not persons, are judged”. People participate in the online world partly to erase or replace one's real world embodiment and embodied statues features of race, class, gender, and etc. People are not putting their “real selves” into it- They negate their actual identities and posit new virtual personas. Avatar to them is what Boellstorff would call it as a “techne” that helps constitute the gap between private and public identity.When this happens, the avatar inherits all of the dualisms that afflict all performing objects and it may be perceived either as living people or as lifeless dolls (Manning, 2009).

In conclusion, there are problems inherent in the reality that we are in today. These problems emerge perhaps as a result of how we are slowly embracing postmodernism attitude in our lives. Inconsistency in our physical world becomes apparent and this blurs our vision to regard our reality as “real”. The new creation of virtual reality allows us to experience the “realness” as never before. Thus, more and more people seek it as an alternative to physical world. For we are the new generation of users who try making media our second life, we still cannot solve the “confusion” of the separation of physical word and virtual world-the line between these two is still blur. This portrays why some of us experience identity crisis. At this moment, we are not yet capable to fully “live real” in virtual world. Loving an avatar is hence not possible in the meantime. However, virtual world itself would manifest and continue to grow in maturity. Sooner in future, virtual world will become more prominent and useful in all ways. Perhaps it will be the reality for us to live a real life. Hence, when things are still in the mists, we may regard virtual world from another angle-perhaps not as a place for to seek our for “realness” but “a space for growth”. As Turkle (1995) says:

“Virtuality need not be a prison. It can be the raft, the ladder, the transitional space, the moratorium, that is discarded after reaching greater freedom. We don't have to reject life on the screen, but we don't have to treat it as an alternative life either. We can use it as a space for growth ... Like the anthropologist returning home from a foreign culture, the voyager in virtuality can return to a real world better equipped to understand its artifices. (Turkle, 1995, p. 263)”

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