Convenient
I think one of the best litmus tests of quality in books about the internet is how they treat Second Life. Because Second Life is almost certainly, objectively not important or relevant enough to warrant most coverage. So when they use it, it tells me one of two things. They either have no idea what they’re talking about, or the example was just too lush for them to pass up. In the latter case, it’s the perfect strawman—a vehicle that can take as much projection and as much manipulation as they need. If you’ve got psycho-theorizing to do about culture or the internet, look no further than Second Life. It’s able, ready and willing.
In other words, it’s convenient. I guess that’s awesome for them but how well are we served by a textbook example of the confirmation bias? Sure, the reader may suspend disbelief and think of the point rather than how it was made. But they shouldn’t have to. The author should be right. And they should know what they’re talking about.
I like when you think you know what the rhyme will be in a song lyric, and then it goes in a direction you didn’t suspect. That’s a songwriter avoiding the convenient impulse. Even if you’ve never thought that before, I think there is a little rush, a little jolt, that comes when the words didn’t follow the trajectory we subconsciously anticipated. Why? Maybe because it means they’re smarter than us or they caught sight of a route we didn’t or it’s just nice to be surprised.
There is something to be said about pushing yourself to be the person that ignores the convenient choice. To commit yourself to understanding the topic well enough that you don’t need to make rely on its “Second Life example.” Also, to start to take some pleasure in seeing the obvious—the available option—and deliberately passing on it. Because you trust that you’re good enough find something better, though it may be more difficult. The ability to survive through shocks and changes and the unexpected is bred into us. We’re evolved for it. It seems to me that we may as well cultivate a channel for expressing those skills rather than allow them to atrophy.
Good ideas. Not such good editing.
Third paragraph, last sentence, “nice to BE surprised.”
Fourth paragraph, second sentence, “commit yourself to understand”, probably should be “understanding”.
Thanks
This is the same for movies, you try to predict the output of the key scenes, and if it was unanticipated, you call it an interesting movie. Though, there are many more, where you can always confidently tell, what is going to happen in the next 5 or ten minutes.
As for convenience, today’s issue of Nature discusses the protein research, and shows that the majority of the studied proteins are the same as 20 years ago, despite that in 2000 a human genome was revealed and in 2010 we know many more important targets when in 90’s. So, clever educated scientists do also adhere to convenient things instead of needed ones. (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7333/full/470163a.html)
I meant, scientists by default should be clever and educated.
Scientists which are clever receive the Nobel prizes (for doing the science which is not convenient)
Second Life is important in the same way as Google Wave or Communism–a lot of smart people seemed to think it would work much better than it did/does, so it would be interesting to know where those smart people went wrong. Other than that, it might make sense to write about Second Life the same way biologists would write about Galapagos or some other tiny island ecology, or anthropologists would write about some isolated tribal society–they work differently from common ecologies and societies, so if you can understand what causes the unusual systems to be different, you might have a better understanding of what makes the common systems the way they are.
But, yeah, a general point about multiplayer virtual worlds is going to be more convincing if it holds true within WoW, and a general point about online social interaction is going to be more convincing if it holds true within Facebook.
OR, they read a news article one time that said Second Life was really popular, they don’t use the internet enough to know any better, end up giving undue influence an insignificant niche. What’s more likely?
No, not OR. I did not say that every reference or even most references, to Second Life in books on the internet were appropriate. It depends on the point you’re making–
if you point to SL and say “this is what the Internet is/will be like”, that would be foolish. If you point to SL and say “SL is like this because of X”, that could be useful.
Sure. But that’s not what people do. They say “Second Life says this about us” or “Second Life teaches us that…” or “_______ did this on Second Life + string of other lame marketing examples.” All of which is to say “Second Life means _________” when the the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t really mean anything outside of being a great example of how hype from blogs can turn a obscure, culty pastime into front page news (only to be quickly forgotten in favor of the next thing)
Saw this a couple months ago: http://thegreatslexpedition.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-do-you-understand-second-life.html
It’s an example of what I’m talking about. According to some sociological theory, the author made a prediction of what Second Life would be like. But the prediction was wrong. This might mean that the general theory is wrong.
In science, when you make predictions, it doesn’t matter how “important” or “obscure” the prediction is. If the prediction is wrong, the theory is wrong. That’s true even if the prediction is about an obscure, culty, over-hyped internet passtime, which I certainly don’t deny describes SL perfectly.
Dude, this article is pretty much exactly what I’m talking about. See how many times he says “People come to Second Life for…” or a variation of? There’s kind of a big problem with that. People, as in a normal generalizable sample of the population, do not come to Second Life. Literally they do not (in that it has a very small userbase) and figuratively they are not “us.” They are a very unique, very unusual, very particular subculture that is not representative of anything but themselves. This isn’t just like how psychology studies tend to be biased because they overuse college students. This is like making inferences about hygiene by asking bums.
If you don’t get that, by all means, enjoy the books. It was a vehicle for making a larger point anyway.
If the entities who come to Second Life are not people, what are they?
There was no implication that all, most, or even typical people go to second life, or that they are in any sense “us”. There was no denial that they are very unique, very unusual, or a very particular subculture. In fact, that was the whole point of the post–that he was only going to Second Life because he was depressed and looking to create a “fantasy self”, but now that he was closer to normal he had far less interest in going there.
Note that under the post-modern/post-human theory that he was formerly operating under, typical people would have wanted something like Second Life: “At that time I saw Second Life as a space of total possibility, and the likely springboard for the Singularity which I imagined would form from people rapidly developing new kinds of selves and building a faster more agile reality separate from RL.” The fact that the people who do go to Second Life are so atypical is the whole point here–it might mean that those theories, still widely held by a surprising number of people (just in technical circles alone there is still a great deal of effort in many projects to somehow make a “3d web”), are wrong.
“This is like making inferences about hygiene by asking bums. ” Actually, sometimes you can learn a lot about something by watching what happens when it isn’t there. We might have larger theories about the causes and effects of hygiene practices. How do those theories hold up in abnormal situations? Scientists spend time looking at unique, unusual, particular environments precisely because the assumptions and prejudices of normal, typical, familiar life do not necessarily hold. It would make no sense to say we can learn nothing about evolution by looking at Galapagos finches because that’s only a tiny number of the world’s birds.
I got your larger point, but you’re wrong about the narrower point. Except the narrow point isn’t all that narrow–you’re wrong about science works, and maybe you should spend less time reading books about the internet and more time reading up on epistemology.
I think that Second Life is a niche, unusual subcommunity much in the way that Usenet was a niche, unusual subcommunity in the 1980s. Right now, Second Life isn’t relevant to the larger American population, but sooner or later someone will find a way to make a Second Life-type community relevant, interesting, and accessible to the masses. I think discussion over Second Life is relevant in what these types of universes will become as opposed to what they currently are.
On a side note, a lot of classical composers did the same thing; they played most of a chord but didn’t allow it to resolve until the end of the piece. Really does make more interesting music.
Paraprosdokians