Letters to the Editor
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What Does It Mean to "Lie" in Second Life?
As a longtime Second Life (SL) resident and virtual worlds researcher, I wonder when I come across arguments like the one Manjoo attributes to Donath (I haven't read Donath's article and only have Manjoo's account of it), what exactly "lying" means in a alternate reality like SL.
I don't subscribe to the position that SL is all "play" and so it doesn't matter anyway (my experience in SL is very real and very personal to me). But neither do I worry too much about "authenticity" or "truth-telling" or whatever. Many people gender bend and role play (these are probably among the deepest "lies" one can engage in in cyberspace). But are they lies? When I gender bend and role play, I am often exploring or cultivating a part of myself, identity, or even sexuality that I cannot attend to in reality, and to me it is profoundly and even painfully honest. But I don't tell everyone I'm a gender bender or whatever. Does that make me a "liar"?
The problem, I think, is that the player's relationship to her or his avatar is complex. An avatar is at once idealized, representative, expressive, experimental, voyeuristic, playful, socially shaped, and technologically conditioned. With all of those going on simultaneously--and not just for me, but for everyone I interact with, and we all know it--where exactly is the stable standard of authenticity to which I measure my own honesty?
I don't mean to dismiss the concern out of hand, but I wonder if oftentimes that concerns like the problem of lying rest on a dubious foundation, a simplified notion that the avatar is a stable representation of the "real world self" (as if that weren't a deeply problematic category of its own).
I am familiar with the work of Donath, who is a star in the field of computer-mediated communications, and I highly doubt she is naive about the issues I am describing. But the ways these ideas get filtered in the media and discussed suggests to me that we, as a culture, have an as yet underdeveloped awareness of the relationships between our avatars and ourselves.
As virtual worlds are used for more--much more--than just gaming, and as more and more of us create, and cultivate, avatars, this issue will, I think, rise in importance.
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Familiarity trumps skill
I used to referee high school basketball. It was tough when I first started. Every coach would yell at me, players would scoff, fans would hurl insults, even though I made what I thought was the right call.
However, after a few years my calls started getting "better". Or was I more familiar to the coaches, players and fans?
This observation became more interesting when I would watch the so-called veteran referees work a game. Here were 70-year old referees who couldn't keep up with the boys' varsity players, making calls from hundreds of miles away, yet the coaches and players never said a word. And most of the time the calls were flat out wrong; when they got it "right" it was because they guessed right, since they were too far away to empirically see any violation.
These veteran referees were "good" because they were familiar, not because they were better than younger, faster referees. And it wasn't so much the calls that perturbed coaches, but the ability of the veteran referees to lay out some cool one-liners to about-to-be-incensed coaches that made them better and put out the perception to outside observers that these veteran referees made better calls, when they were no different than calls made by younger, faster referees that lacked the ability to deal professionally with the aftermath of a "good" call.
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There's One Born Every Minute
I have a secondlife persona somewhere. I worked around with it for a couple of weeks, but it was pretty clunky. For a while, I looked like myself and that was boring. I realized that I never dress up in person because it is expensive and uncomfortable, so I dressed up my avatar. I started her off with a 1950s ensemble, complete with long gloves and a sequinned top. After I fiddled with the hair, I decided, what the hell - I made her look like a young Diana Ross. I wound up "friending" a guy whose avatar was a tuxedoed, dapper type. It was fun flying around.
Then, I started getting invites to African American clubs and India-Indian clubs (the surname I picked was Singh - goes with the Diana Ross thing.)I felt very silly and dishonest and have not gone back in since.
I viewed it as a fun fantasy exercise, but I hear that corporations are meeting in SL and a friend of mine is going to do an online booksigning in SL. There's a real potential for fraud because of people's credulity and the only thing I can say is "caveat emptor" when visiting such a site.
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Deception
The scope for finding new ways to deceive or perhaps more pertinently, to persuade others to your cause in Digital World is fascinating. Maybe we need to explore ways to upgrade our bullshit radar in cyberspace.
B.S. Detector Version 1, anyone?
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I can't wait...
...until I can live my avatar's virtual life physically. Does this get us a little closer to a Matrix experience? Or any kind of Gibson/Dick world? When wet-wiring works, plug me in! This world has lost its lustre.
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Since Sex Sells
I'd like to see the researchers try a variation on their experiment. Rather than a politician, morph the person's characteristics with a sexually desirable avatar. Have the avatar try to persuade the subject to buy something, donate to a cause, or take other concrete action.
Would they?
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This requires research?
People lie online. If they couldn't lie easily and transparently, most people wouldn't bother. There are those who use the online environment to meet people with obscure common interests, but mostly it's people trying to escape from the life they actually have. Why would anyone choose to be an overweight, balding, divorced accountant when they can be a wealthy yachtsman? Or a 50 year old office worker when they can be a 30 year old nymphomaniac supermodel?
In business dealings I can see how this is a real problem, which is why I don't see virtual worlds replacing video conferencing any time soon - an avatar or text on a screen leaves out half the information you get from a live person or live video.
But Second Life (or as I call it, Second Rate, because it is truly awful, and truly pointless, software)? Anyone who would even think about conducting serious business in SL is crazy. Even if you know who you think you are dealing with, you don't know who you are actually dealing with.
Google may come to the rescue here with their virtual world, if - and only if - they incorporate real security and allow for some sort of strong connection to the real world. They already plan to use GoogleEarth as the foundation from what I am told, but if they let me claim the Taj Mahal it won't be any better than SL. If they make it so web cams and phone numbers are strongly associated with the locations where they actually exist, they may have something cool and useful on their hands.
But no one should expect to be able to conduct real business in a toy universe.