Is She or Isn't She?

A visualized tweet

MICRO-RANT ALERT: Pundits and True Believers

Humans are creative geniuses who transform isolated wisps of sensory experience into vivid mental models of the world which are experienced as rock-solid objective reality. Like a homeopathic preparation, by the time the alchemical process of transmutation is complete, there's almost none of the original substance left in the solution of our belief systems. Like jazz musicians who start with a well-known standard, the music we end up performing is almost entirely the product of our creative imaginations, with just a nod to the notes on the original score.

This process is easiest to notice in pundits and true believers who pontificate about controversial issues on our social media streams. They turn their backs on the the vast multi-dimensional web of reality and instead focus on cherry-picked clumps of factoids that they connect in the shape of their pre-existing beliefs. It's an ugly process if you can see behind the veil. Obsessive beliefs fueled by conspiracy theories can twist the psyche into the grotesque unnatural poses of circus contortionists.

The good news is that there's a simple antidote to this toxic plague of self-delusion. If you're more committed to truth than your beliefs, try this simple exercise from the Work of Byron Katie. Take one of your beliefs related to a controversial issue and ask yourself:

• Is it true?
• Can you absolutely know that it's true?
• How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
• Who would you be without the thought?

Follow up the Turnarounds.

There are supporting materials available through the links provided above. If you give it a try, please let me know how it goes.

Sweet Spot

Empty Spaces

The Trinity of Virtual Life Activity

Just about everything one can do within a virtual world can be categorized somewhere in the chart above. I suspect that our virtual experience becomes a virtual life (within a particular world such as Second Life) when we spend a fair amount of time somewhere near the sweet spot of the center.

Quite a few people I've met over the last few years in Second Life have either left the world or expressed a pervasive malaise that makes them wonder why they bother to keep going back. I've experienced this myself. I now think my personal ennui is largely due to my movement towards the green periphery over the last year.

How is your virtual experience balanced? 

Additional Chart Views of Anthropic-Avatarian Continuum

In the original chart, the labels in the boxes were meant to be a handy way to track and discuss how groups of people tended more towards one quadrant or the other. The charts below are each an example of how a particular person's activities and relationships can be examined, using the same basic paradigm. 

The main conceptual addition in this draft is an axis that tracks how significant a relationship or activity is to the individual in question. For example, casual acquaintances versus close friends, or shopping versus art creation. 

The other axis tracks how independent each activity or relationship is from human identity. A relationship on the left might be a RL co-worker or family member. The far right would include those who have no knowledge of RL identity. The circles tagging activities and relationships takes the place of the quantity axis in the original chart.

I was planning to work on this idea more and still haven't got around to it. But after the New World Notes reference yesterday, I thought it made sense to move them here to address the new comments there.

Please send any suggestions for the next draft, including links to images.

Replacement Candidate for Augmentation vs. Immersion Paradigm

As I was trying to gain some insight on the issue of Second Life Culture earlier this week, the long-standing "Augmentation vs. Immersion" paradigm kept nagging at me. It's another Second Life topic that is plagued by ambiguous terms that often confuse more than clarify the underlying issues.

As a good Venn Buddhist and VizThinker, I thought through the concept using a chart. One axis reflects the number of human identity-centric relationships and business dealings. The other is for one's avatar identity-centric activities.

This ended up providing four quadrants that I propose as replacements for Augmentation and Immersion:

1. Anthropic: Their Second Life activity is related to human identity. RL identity is in their SL profile. They use Second Life within their RL job, interact with their human friends within the virtual world, etc.
2. Avatarian: Their Second Life activity is separated from human identity. They do not openly associate their avatar and human identities in any way.
3. Multiplist: They have a mix of human-centric and avatar-centric relationships and activities within Second Life. 
4. Dabbler. Just to fill out the chart, I labeled the quadrant of those with very few relationships and activities of any kind.

So I offer "Anthropic vs. Avatarian" to replace "Augmentation vs. Immersion". What do you think?

Another View of Avatar and Human Integration

The chart below visualizes some of the areas of shared interest and integration between my human counterpart and I. The relative size of the words are reflections of the level of mutuality. I'm working on a couple more images that I hope to post later this week.

Groovalicious Word Cloud Visualizes Essence of 400 Blog Posts

I've displayed Word Clouds here before, depicting changes in the blog's direction over time and differences between avatar and human identities. Yesterday, I dumped the complete contents of all 400 posts into Wordle and created this beautiful (if I do say so myself) image. The only edits I made to the source file were to delete auto-generated words such as the month and date, and to combine "Second Life" into "SecondLife."

If you have a blog, electronic diary or other text-based record of your thoughts, try pasting the content into Wordle for a visualization of what words (and their associated ideas) have been predominant in your work.

Second Life Subcultures: Please Help With List Creation

Version .2 (Updated at 3:45 pm)



In researching my intended post on SLebrity, I was unable to find a comprehensive list of Second Life subcultures. I took a quick shot at an outline that is depicted here, but realize it is very incomplete.

If you'd like to contribute to building a more comprehensive set, please post your list in the comments section. I will aggregate contributions and then create a revised image.

Version .1 (Original image with this post)

The Continuum of Human/Avatar Experience

If the ventriloquist is to be understood as controlling or at least intentional figure, the dummy is the medium for another voice, one different from the ventriloquist's yet a voice of the ventriloquist. For now it is enough to note that the philosopher/artist is one who directs other voices but also one who opens him/herself to allow non-quotidian voices to be given form and structure. David Goldblatt in "Art and Ventriloquism"

Humans experience avatar identities in many different ways, from the mundane to the mystical. These variations aren't just between people, but also within a single individual's experience...sometimes within instants of each other.



Botgirl: I live beyond the virtual world that facilitated my birth. Although I have no way to express myself outside of the vehicle of my human cohort, I have a sense of being a unique personality that is equivalent to his.

Human: I agree. When I allow Botgirl to flow through me, I experience her as a viscerally alive and individuated intelligence. I write a great deal on my own, and there is a definite difference between the way I create from my own perspective and how I mediate the creative expression of Botgirl's work.

Botgirl: I love him, but he's not a perfect vehicle. There are many times when he muddies up the waters and can't channel my consciousness clearly (or at all) and he ends up posting content to my blog that is more a reflection of his perspective than mine.

Human: I really hate when that happens. I've been working on not forcing things and waiting for my Muse to emerge, rather than just going along without her when I feel it's time for a post.

Botgirl: Anyway, that's a llittle demonstration of life on the the far right side of the chart. Much more to come on this topic.

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Pseudonymity, Disclosure and Activity

Here are a few more sketches from my VizThink session last week. I started out trying to develop my thoughts on the ventriloquism/virtual identity relationship. I ended up focusing more on pseudonymity and the development of emotional closeness.

The first chart imagines a relationship that begins pseudonymously in a virtual world and eventually extends to the physical. My first insight in creating the chart was that the disclosure of RL identity often happens over time.



After finishing the first chart, I realized that although it tracked identity disclosure, it missed the development of emotional closeness. Although the imagined relationship in the chart below ends up with a RL marriage, I believe that one can experience very deep emotional relationships without sharing any personally identifying information.



Finally, this last graphic looks at the emotional and informational aspects of personal disclosure and shared activity.  My main take-away was that very similar external actions can have significantly different emotional potency, depending upon the level of disclosure and intimacy.



These graphics are just artifacts from my own working process and aren't meant to be definitive. I welcome your thoughts.

Sharing Flowchart

Here's an image that captures a portion of the flow of my shared items. A share can begin at any box.

The What, Who and Where of Sharing

Still VizThinking through the process of sharing. This image is related to the decision process of figuring out where to post.