The metaverse

I'm spending more and more of my time in some other space defined only by a humming collection of servers. I have an avatar there -- his name is Colin Alacrity. I've just taken a snapshot of myself. Don't laugh. When I first climbed aboard SecondLife, I threw together an outfit, basically pasted a nice picture of a sunset onto the default white t-shirt and couldn't really quite figure out how to get shoes on my feet, but did find a way to give my skin a greenish hue. Then, sometime later, I met someone I knew in real life 'in-world' and was taken aback by the fact that he'd taken some pains to make his avatar look a bit like him. So I found myself a dark corner to hide in, and I stripped off my default clothes and put together something that looked like an outfit I might wear. I spent a fair bit of time on my physique, my face, my hair and ended up with something that looked a bit like me. Only, in some indefinable way, no matter how hard I try, my avatar looks better than I do. I'm not sure if it's because I haven't mastered all of those fancy sliders or if my subconscious just won't let me in far enough to be completely objective about things. It would be interesting to get someone else to design me.

I'm not sure where all of this metaverse is going for me. I began to explore it because of a colleague who has grand visions of what such constructions could eventually mean for all of us. I vacillate between thinking it is nothing more than a 3d chat room, to thinking that it is something much more interesting. Certainly, it has attracted the attention of a large number of very clever people, including a few who seem to believe that it can be used for some very interesting research -- a kind of computational social science is how one recent news report described it. I have some ideas for interesting projects in the metaverse, but I'm not sure how much time I want to invest in this.

A part of me feels that it is exactly the wrong approach. Rather than trying to shrug off our embodiment, pixelize our relationship with the physical, I really do feel at heart that we should embrace it, dig our fingers into the dirt. I read today that Roland Barthes had objected to the Eiffel Tower because he thought it gave people a chance to look down on Paris from a great height and to generate the illusion for themselves that they understood what it was. Metaverses may have the same effect.

But another part of me suspects that these digital constructions may hold great power as ways to connect people to one another and perhaps, if they are integrated with facets of the real world, to connect people with places -- perhaps even creating new and very strange kinds of hybrid places that are, in part flesh and blood and soil and leaf and, in part, the play of electrons, plasma, and fiber optics. It seems critical that if all of this is to be a positive thing, we need to make the latter serve the former.

The last thing we need is another justification for abandonment of the body and the ground it walks upon.