Reading Radar

Ok, now this is cool. Dusan Writer points out the horribly named Viwogeo, from a link provided by Pais Kidd.

Basically the premise is that if you have a build in SL that mirrors a RL location, it can go on this map so that the RL map location links to the SLurl of the SL build location.

Got all that? Yeah, confusing in words, but simple and really cool in practice. Check it out.

What? Nothing in Kazakhstan? Or even CANADA!?! Come on, I know those crazy Canucks have something in SL. Come on… add the SLurl to the Viwogeo map… you know you want to! I mean, come on, Wichita, KANSAS has one for crying out loud.

Know what’s interesting to me? I can write a detailed post on recording voice in SL, which I think is an interesting and useful topic, and while it gets a lot of views and mentions by others, a post about the psychology of avatar appearance blows it away in terms of numbers of people reading it.

It says to me that people really care about the social aspects of it more than anything, but sadly the metaverse or mirror world or trick universe, whatever you want to call it, is not going to be ubiquitous until you can make it as easy to use and navigate as playing tunes on an ipod. Then it will truly be what most people really focus on, a social platform that anyone (ok, anyone with a powerful computer) can access easily.

The sad thing to me is that a lot of people don’t really get that it’s the best platform ever for content creation with as little learning as possible. Yeah, they understand that, but not on a personal level. IOW, they haven’t taken that fact and made it their own by doing it themselves. Although the technologies behind this are limited (LSL, sculpties, etc, don’t really match up to non-SL equivalent technologies), the combination of relatively small learning curve in building and programming and breadth of scope presented by the types of content and the in-world tools used are probably second to none.

I don’t know what it means, but I do know this… as fascinating as whatever psychological mysteries an inner 3d world presents are, they can’t really beat the fun of making stuff. Because content creation presents an endless opportunity for learning, while worrying excessively about what it all means is fun, but in the end, it’s all psychobabble about how we relate to 1’s and 0’s arrayed in the form of a new world. And while philosophy is fun, accomplishing stuff is more fun.

I work in a company that’s intelligence and data driven. New technologies and processes are being created and they need to be done right. So a premium is placed on brain power. If you look good, great, but really, who the hell cares. What can you DO? The standouts who are more looks and socially driven are in marketing, and umm. Yeah. Marketing. Those are the people who talk for a living, and to be quite honest, I don’t think have a fucking clue about technology. Sure, they have the buzzwords down, but not true, deep, make it happen kind of knowledge. Not like the people pulling engineering solutions out of their hats on a daily basis. But hey, the majority of them sure look good.

Now contrast that to Second Life, where, regardless if you talk for a living or are an extremely knowledgeable content creator, chances are you have an avatar that’s (in a cartoon way, of course) beautiful or good looking, or idealized in some, if not most, regards. Let’s not beat around the bush, in SL if you don’t have an ideally shaped avatar, people wonder what you’re trying to prove or say or do. Right? When’s the last time you saw more than a couple of non-white or asian looking avatars in a month (furries, robots, and martians don’t count)? When’s the last time you saw a chunky avatar, aside from the boobs and bootie sliders to 100 club?

In Pattern Recognition, William Gibson used the term “Mirror World” to explain how Cayce felt about the differences between England and the US… worlds that looked deceptively the same, but in many ways were not. I think the term “Mirror World” works as a description of Second Life, not only on that level, but also on the level that it’s revealing about what humans expect from themselves, and others. If you think not looking great in RL relegates you to a lower caste, try that in second life… in many circles, you’ll practically be a non-entity, and might even be labeled as a griefer if you look weird enough. The assumption will be that you’re there to throw a monkey in the wrench.

If the outer world progresses en masse into the inner world, rather than breaking down barriers, I’d say we’re buying into the very things that we should be running away from as fast as both our atomic and our pixelated legs can take us. Pressures to be this. Pressures to be that. Equating beauty with value of personality or worth of soul. Are we rushing headlong into a mode of thinking in which no one even considers anymore the rightness of being able to peer past the surface and ascertain the truth of something, or is it all a bunch of pixels anyway, and no one’s really fooled or concerned about it? I think the seriousness with which people apply RL norms of beauty and trappings of social status to their avatars says it’s more the former than the latter.

That’s why the Crap Mariners and Keeme Browns and Razzap Snookums of the world with their robot, dinosaur, and martian avatars get my vote. And, oh yeah, the Rezzednecks too. They realize the absurdity of accepting the Mirror World as more than what it is, and they say so by refusing to accept the conventional wisdom that, having been presented with the opportunity for pixelated perfection, one has no choice but to accept it.

By the way, speaking of all the aforementioned characters… keep an eye out on the Rezzednecks rss feed in the next week or so.