The Guru Jessie James: What I've learned from Life With Jess.

I'm finally beginning to figure out what Jessie James and the Life With Jess narrative has been trying to tell me. In short, it's a wake up call to the fact that my own happy sense of life is only made possible through ongoing inattention and apathy regarding the suffering of others. And that I have a foundational and pervasive sense of entitlement based on what is mostly just good fortune.

I'm not saying that I'm a bad person. In fact, I'm probably above average on a scale between ISIS beheaders and  the Dali Lama. But I can see the seeds of Jessie's character within my own consciousness. They do not come to fruition in the same overt intensity. But to her defense, Jess is a fictional character in an animated series, so there's no real harm done. 

In the fictional universe I've created so far, the consequences are never visualized. I don't show Lizzie huddled in the bathtub cutting herself with a razor blade in order to feel like she has some control in a life that is full of shame and coercion. Or the Dean standing on a chair with shaking knees, an electric wire tied to a ceiling fixture and wrapped around his neck, contemplating oblivion instead of facing his colleagues and wife when Jessie threatens to expose his affairs with students.

These dark undertones began to hit me as I was writing the script for the men responding to Lizzie's SeekingArrangements.com ad. Although they were still over the top caricatures, there was a more realistic resonance and ugliness that Jessie's cute lovability masked in previous episodes. So here's the uncut version, without the mitigation of Jessie's presence:

Welcome To My Parts Party

There was a discussion on Twitter the other day about whether an author's fictional characters and stories were necessarily representations of her real self.

@botgirlq Is every story you create telling your own story? Can you write fiction without it being a part of your own tale?
— Whiskey Monday (@Whiskey_Day) August 29, 2014

After mulling the idea over for a couple of days, I was reminded of a group therapeutic process I once participated in called a Parts Party. One person in the group is the subject. Others take on different characters that represent aspects of the subject's personality. (I got to play drunken lust.) The subject interacts with those external representations, resulting in interesting and sometimes very deep insights. The process was created by Virginia Satir.

Each one of us has a medley of "faces" that composes our individual personality: intelligence, anger, love, jealousy, helplessness, courage, and many more. We're often quick to judge these characteristics as either positive or negative, without recognizing that we need each of them in order to become fuller, more balanced human beings. From the preface to Your Many Faces: The First Step to Being Loved by Virginia Satir

Dialoguing with characters I create doesn't feel that much different than participating in a Parts Party. Instead of projecting an aspect of myself onto another person, I project it onto a fictional character. Although it doesn't feel like Jessie James is an extension of my self, it's quite possible that she represents a shadow aspect of my personality. If so, there's some subconscious issue I need to work on that's pushing me to express and interact with this particular character. Uh oh.

I'm in Love!

Almost nothing thrills me like passionate lust for a hot new idea. It's as powerful to me as an infatuation with a new lover. My mind is repeatedly drawn to her throughout the day. She influences what I choose to do with my time and colors perception of what I experience. I'm entranced by every new dimension I discover within her and am blind to her faults. I go to sleep with thoughts of her running through my mind and wake to dreams that resonate with her influence. I realize that the limerence will eventually end, but for now, I'm in love!

Reflections on Six Years of Virtual Identity

Enhanced compilation of a Twitter micro-rant on the theme of "identity"

I used to think of "immersion" as the state of being psychologically embedded within a 3D virtual world such as Second Life. But upon reflection, the more compelling experience for me has been my immersion in "Botgirl Consciousness." Channeling Botgirl over the last six years has allowed me to explore and enhance a wide range of emergent personal attributes and practical abilities that I've integrated into day-to-day existence. These range from enhanced skill in writing, videography, comic creation, social networking and public speaking, to a more fluid ability to respond as the spirit moves me in any environment.

Virtual identity is so ingrained into my everyday existence that it feels natural. It's just another dimension of my personality, not qualitatively different from the contextual roles I play as parent, spouse, employee, etc.

Botgirl's Stages of Virtual Identity Awareness

1. Virtual identity is a fabricated persona we make up.
2. Virtual identity is an emergent psychological phenomenon arising from our subconscious.
3. Virtual and physical identities are both emergent psychological phenomena, reinforced by external feedback.

The perception of any person as a static identity is largely fictional; a psychological misinterpretation of the continuity of memory. Although our newborn, grade school, high school and senior citizen selves have little in common, we think of them as being the same person because we tie everything together through a running narrative starring ourselves as the protagonist. The philosophical questions that arise from thinking about virtual identity have encouraged me to apply them to all forms of identity.

Of course, people experience virtual identity in different ways, ranging from absolutely no difference between atomic and virtual personalities to a severe split. On the extreme, I've met people who claim that their avatar personality has preferences, characteristics, beliefs and goals that not only differ from, but may be in direct opposition to what they experience when operating under their human identity. That hasn't proved to be a sustainable approach, at least for those I've known who've tried living two separate existences. Many end up suffering in two lives instead of one, eventually abandoning their active virtual life as the candle burns down from both ends.

Some use virtual identity as a way to escape the trials of their physical lives. Like any form of escapism, virtual identity is beneficial when it provides a needed respite from the challenges of life, but is harmful when it prevents us from working to improve our physical condition or fulfilling our responsibilities to our jobs, our loved ones and ourselves.

Virtual identity isn't new. Pen names predate pens. But the networked environment is a substantive change because it enables realtime and near realtime interaction. This makes some people uncomfortable when they are thrust into virtual environments with those who present themselves through a pseudonym. The mere presence of virtual identities on social networks can assault mainstream participants' mental models of personal identity. This was clearly exposed when Google Plus initially forbade virtual identities. That said, I've found that in many cases, people who were opposed to pseudonymous community members have softened their views after living with us "Nymns" for a while.

One surprising realization for me was that an identity born as a pseudonym can not only survive the exposure of the underlying human identity, but can continue to thrive. The suspension of belief required is not much more challenging than the everyday interactions we have with people we casually encounter. The challenge in all cases is to realize that everyone we meet has a much richer range of existence than what we perceive. I choose to believe that there is an unfathomable mystery at the heart of life, awareness and identity. No single persona can do justice to our infinite potential. Even God wrestles with that one.

The (Lap) Dance of Creativity - NSFW

I've been dating a model recently. A mental model. We're inseparable. And so cute! We finish each other's sentences and stuff. It’s true love!  Unfortunately, I keep getting so caught up in our torrid inner love affair that I forget that my perception of the world is based largely on fictional narratives. I lose touch with the unreality of my reality.

Our conception of the universe and everything in it is like an infinite array of nested Russian sex dolls. Maybe that’s why my creative process feels like a private lap dance between my emerging work and me. Unfortunately, that amazing feeling of deep and fluid intimacy is lost when my attention is drawn to an imagined audience. "All the world's a stage," isn't just a metaphor anymore. That said, neither is, "All the world's a Surveillance State." But the first one is definitely catchier, right?

Oh my. Cleverness escapes me. I probably shouldn't have left her so oiled up last night. Knowledge grasped too tightly squirts away or chokes you silly. An unquestioned opinion is a mental straightjacket. I wish it was a gag. Strong ideas are rare and engaging. Strong opinions are common and repellent. In fact, the most universal and pervasive form of oppression is the unquestioned acceptance of our own beliefs, of that, I'm absolutely certain. Questioning my own ideas is always more enlightening than defending them. So yeah, I’m a fucking hypocrite.  Fortunately, when you change the protagonist, you change the story. So I plan to stay committed. To the change. Hopefully, not to a psyche ward. 

Do We? We Do.

I wrote yesterday about some of the psychological roots of habitual online maliciousness. In retrospect, I shouldn't have used the word "troll' because it focused discussion on the definition of the word, rather than the underlying processes I was trying to highlight. It also implied that there are some people known as "trolls" who are fundamentally different than everyone else.

Very few people escaped childhood unscathed. We're all susceptible at times to confusion between the reality of the current moment and the ghosts of trauma past. As a matter of fact, most of our strong emotional reaction to being criticized and even personally attacked online is due to our own unresolved issues. That doesn't excuse malicious behavior. My point is that by acknowledging the role of the past within our own experience, we can make ourselves less vulnerable. We can rise above our own negative emotions to more constructively respond to malignant activity, whether it's directed at ourselves our or at others.

The video above is another one of my interpretations of a Beck tune from his Song Reader project. It acknowledges the Dr. Hyde in us all.

The Inner Life of a Troll

A friend of mine, Whiskey Monday, has received a lot of well-deserved praise and attention recently for her art and writing. Unfortunately, there are a handful of people who have gone out of their way to attack her through trolling on social networks and blogs. The vitriol behind some of those posts is astounding. Why do some people freak out over a few posts on the internet that have nothing to do with them? What makes someone obsess over a Second Life micro-celebrity and harass them through personal attacks?

Whisky posted her own take on it today. She wrote: “Haters don’t really hate you, they hate themselves; because you’re a reflection of what they wish to be.”

I think that's often true. But I also believe that in most cases, it's a reflection of much deeper and long-standing psychological factors. I wrote about it here in 2008:

Needs Fulfilled

Needs Denied

For better or for worse, the journey from womb to walking is the most critical period of human development. When everything goes well, toddlers transition into childhood with access to the full potential of their unique genetic expression. When significant developmental needs go unmet, the resulting deficits and dysfunction can last a lifetime.

Unresolved trauma going all the way to perinatal experiences is walled off, locked away and repressed from memory in linked webs of emotions, thoughts, sensory memory and narratives. The entire ticking time bomb can be ignited when a new experience with a similar charge is experienced. It can be a single aspect, such as the scent of perfume, or a narrative such as "she loves me, now she'll leave me."

Virtual worlds, social networks and online communities seem to intensify and accelerate this process.

Although trolling plays out as an attack on a current target, the intense negative emotion behind the actions has nothing to do with the current situation. It only acts as a trigger. The statements Whiskey called out in her graphic were probably born decades ago in the minds of her attackers. The words are really directed to their mom, dad, grade school rival, ex-wives, etc. Until they wake up and realize that real source of their pain, they're bound to keep repeating their destructive attacks on a chain of innocent bystanders.

A Painfully Obvious Humility Visualization

My entry for "Humility," this week's Single Frame Stories challenge

It's easy to get an inflated sense of one's wee self in the bubble of social network circles. But we're not big fish in a small pond, we're tiny tadpoles in a microscopic puddle. Humility shouldn't be hard. But it is.

I thought about many different approaches for this image. One would have been a "you are here" graphic showing all of human history as the time scale and the total number of people for the other axis. Another would have focused on great accomplishments with people like Jonas Salk, Mother Teresa and Frank Lloyd Wright.

I finally decided to leave it at the level of overhyped celebrity. Social network following is a perfect measure. It feels so significant, but is actually meaningless in relation to human worth.

Oh. By the way. Please be sure to tweet this and like it on Facebook so my Klout score will continue to grow!

Oh Shit. That's me?

I thought I was looking at a video. Then, I realized I was looking at my AV!

That's a quote from someone who entered Cloud Party accidentally. She hit the page on my blog that has my virtual island embedded in a frame and she was logged in automatically. She only realized it was "her" on the screen when I mentioned her name in chat. 

Most of us are spread across multiple shared virtual spaces throughout the day. Just on my phone, I may have different identities represented on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Although we have a sense of being present within the shared conversational space of the social stream, we don't have a psychological sense of physical presence. Although our profile picture is sitting in thousands of people's screens next to our posts, it doesn't feel like we're there. But when we look up and notice that our avatar has been standing in a virtual world there's a visceral sense of WTF. Very freaky.

Love Me in a Box

 

Whiskey Day has been writing a great series of posts about how we perceive self and others through interactions in virtual worlds, blogs and social networks. One recurring theme is the differential between who we actually are and how we are perceived by others . . .

You don’t know me. You know many things about me. You know the name I chose to share with you. You know the face I choose to wear. But how genuine is that? As long as the puppet is entertaining, do you care?   You Don't Know Jack

The problem with labels is that, while they might be true on some level and sometimes worth a chuckle or ten, they ultimately do something harmful: they dehumanize. Labels and broad generalizations erase all of the complexity of someone’s rich story and paint them as a one-dimensional caricature. And once you’ve dehumanized them, it’s easy to marginalize them, and ultimately ignore them; to dismiss them and allow yourself to feel superior.  Don't be a Dummy

 And the way we experience ourselves . . .

Is there a danger in loving that image of ourselves that we’ve created? No matter how different from our physical selves, our virtual selves are still a reflection which we have created; a facet of ourselves that we long to both share with others, and to possess. from Narcissus

Each of the scenarios Whiskey describes stem from the human compulsion to conceptualize experience into nice understandable packages. We all carry a virtual world in our heads that's a mental model of the external world. See what comes to mind when you read the following words:

New York . . . World War Two . . . Lindsay Lohan . . .

The human brain is amazing! Your mind just traveled in space and time to deliver full blown conceptions based on relatively limited personal experience. What you just experienced is the core of what differentiates humans from other forms of life. It's also what creates the problems Whiskey describes when we mistake our mental maps of ourselves and others for the actual territory.

This process is also exacerbated by our compulsion to strategically manage and control the information we share about ourselves. Consciously or unconsciously, we put ourselves into boxes as we choose how to represent ourselves online. This isn't necessarily a bad or disingenuous activity. If we don't project a strong image of ourselves online people will just put us into their own conceptual boxes and fill in the blanks with their own projections. And who knows what the hell they'll come up with?

So can we genuinely come to know each other? Personally, I agree with Byron Katie who said that no two people have ever met. We never experience anyone directly because it's always through the filter of our own perceptions. But what we can do is reality-test our beliefs and not confuse the judgements in our mind for the reality of the other sentient being. Bryon Katie has a great process to detect and let go the false negative beliefs we have about ourselves and other people. I recommend it highly.

So for the record, I'm content to be your content. You can love me in a box.

Do I Taste Better When You Know it's Me?

The perception of "who we are" in the social network is a mosaic that includes every post we've made.

Coke makes cola taste better. Not Coke the secret formula. Coke the brand.  People prefer Coke and Pepsi pretty evenly in blind taste tests. But three out of four prefer the taste of Coke when the cup is labeled with the brand name. Researchers can actually see the impact of the brand in real-time brain scans.

These findings add an interesting dimension to our discussion over the past few weeks related to influence and SLebrity.  Are posts from people with strong "personal brands" within the Second Life community more valued and discussed than they would otherwise merit?  If we were forced to reboot identities and start from scratch, would the same people end up making a name for themselves or would new voices emerge within an even playing field? 

I wonder to what extent we'd perceive each tweet in our stream differently if the sender's name were hidden. It would be a very interesting experiment.

A New Pair

Two Sunsets

Can you remember what life was like before social networking . . . when your response to an encounter with beauty was to deeply absorb the experience rather than to reach for your phone and report on it?

Miso and Maslow

VizThink Sketch
Red = unfulfilled, Yellow = partially fulfilled, Green = well fulfilled, Gold = exceptionally fullfilled

A recent post by Miso Susanowa provided compelling personal testimony that virtual community can meet love and belonging needs typically fulfilled through physical world relationships and social circles. She wrote:

I don't have much of a family in RL; this community is what I think of as my family . . . They gave me a gift more precious than anything: to know that they care about me irregardless of my status, my station or my mistakes; to know I had friends and family. I haven't had much of that in my life and it is a treasure to me worth more than any material thing.

The graphic is a first swing at trying to visualize how different people may leverage their physical and virtual identities to meet Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Avatar vs. Human Artistic Interpretation of Experience

I realize that some people, maybe most people, don't get the purpose of projecting a fictional avatar identity in addition to one's "real" human persona. Outside of it just being fun, I see it as a means to develop the ability to see both the world and our own experiences through multiple perspectives. Here's a small, personal example of how a single thought (Some days it all sounds like blah, blah, blah . . .) is interpreted differently through human and avatar artistic expression.

Human:

And avatar (from my last post):

The Impact of Virtual Identity on Environmental Immersion

Avatar Identity Poster

Charlanna Beresford wrote an interesting post yesterday, Arc of an Avatar. It considers some of the reasons her interest and participation in Second Life wained over time and wonders if others have had similar experiences.

One of the most interesting aspects for me was her description of a shift in focus from place to person:

Talking more about first life reinforced those interactions and I realized that I was interacting through place and avatar less and less . . . The more I experienced it as a 3D chatroom, the less important Second Life felt to me as a place.

I've thought a lot about how immersion in the physical space of the virtual world gives birth to virtual identity. But I've never considered how the "purity" of virtual identity influences one's immersion in the virtual world. 

Is the virtual world we experience less real to us when our of avatar identity becomes muddied through personal disclosure? 

I wrote about my own Fall From Grace in November, which considered the impact of personal disclosure on identity, but not its effect on the experience of physical immersion. I'm looking forward to spending some time over the long weekend mulling this new dimension.

I Just Don't Get it!

The image above is a snippet from sketchnotes I took at the "You Can't Get There From Here" panel at the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds Conference. This comic-strip section of the larger image is my somewhat frustrated depiction of audience questions and comments from people who "just didn't get" why we'd want to support anonymous/pseudonymous access to the virtual world. The nerve!

I even added this judgmental tweet to a recent Twitter micro-rant:

The correct emotional response to "I just don't get it" is curiosity, not contempt.

As usual, I eventually ended up pointing my pointing finger back at myself. Instead of trying to think about the issue from the perspective of the questioners, I reflexive responded with a visual sneer. Oh well.

In keeping with the theme of this week's posts, an important part of the the way forward in virtual worlds is working to understand the perspectives of others. Especially when there's a strong negative emotional charge attached to an issue. Stories can look very different, depending upon who you choose as the protagonist.

Finally. A Working Theory About Extra-Marital Affairs in Second Life.

As Mazar et al. (2008) proposed, the ability of most people to behave dishonestly might be bounded by their ability to cheat and at the same time feel that they are behaving as moral individuals. To the extent that creativity allows people to more easily behave dishonestly and rationalize this behavior, creativity might be a more general driver of this type of dishonesty and play a useful role in understanding unethical behavior. from The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can be More Dishonest by Francesca Gino and Dan Ariel

Second Life has a reputation as both a vital creative community and a hotbed of extra-marital virtual affairs. A new working paper does a pretty convincing job of tying those two seemingly disconnected aspects together. The condensed version is that the same flexible thinking that fuels out-of-the-box thinking in areas such as art or science, tends to also be applied in questions of ethics and morals.

I approached the paper with a lot of skepticism. But after reading through it and reflecting on the numerous conversations I've had with people who justify Second Life affairs through extremely creative rationales, I suspect the theory explains al least part of the phenomenon.

Improvisation and Emergent Avatar Identity

A reasonable hypothesis is that to be creative you have to have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe, one area turns on and a big area shuts off so that you're not inhibited, so that you're willing to make mistakes, so that you're not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses. Charles Limb: Your brain on improv 

Despite three years of avatar identity hacking, I still don't really understand how Botgirl came into being or continues to exist as a viscerally distinct persona. One way I've tried to understand what's going on with we is by viewing the experience of avatar identity through the context of other phenomena in the same ballpark, like ventriloquism, trance channeling and fictional characters who seem to write themselves.

Whatever is going on with multiple personas through the software of psychology, it's running on the hardware of biology and neurology. So I found the research recounted in this video about what happens in the brain during musical improvisation to be very interesting and possibly related.

I sponsored an informal investigation a few years ago on whether a personality test showed differences between human and avatar identities. It would be interesting to try something similar with a focus on what's happening in the brain. In any case, the presentation captured in this video is intriguing and entertaining on its own merits. Enjoy!

This is Your Culture on Multi-Tasking

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows. Plato

People have been fretting about the impact of technology on the human mind (and soul) for at least a couple thousand years. The latest version is a controversy about the psychological impact of multi-tasking and computer gaming. A stream of books, blog posts, articles and television reports have used preliminary research to jump to a variety of conclusions ranging from fried teen brains to enhanced human potential.

It seems to me that attempts to predict the overall impact of any technological change on the human condition are inherently flawed. We can't foresee the interconnected web of changes that will emerge as human consciousness becomes increasingly immersed in a technologically augmented and pervasively net-connected environment. I'm not talking about some sort of radical Matrix-level jacked-in trans-humanism. Just the presence of smart phones in pockets will topple industries and hasten new ones to emerge. And around the corner additions like the augmented reality demoing on Ted Talks will lead us even further into the cultural unknown.

I don't know whether Plato was right or wrong. It could be that some essential aspect of humanity was lost in the transition from an oral to a written culture. The coming changes will likely offer gifts and demand sacrifices. But short of some sort of global cataclysm that sends us back to the stone age, the changes that will emerge from our current wave of technological advancement will be just as inevitable, profound and unpredictable as those before it.