MetaverseU reflections
Posted on February 17, 2008
Filed under Events, Reflections, Reviews
MetaverseU
Some quick reflections on the conference before leaving Palo Alto. Themes and comments that resonated for me.
- The Metaverse Roadmap: Relevant, useful conceptual model-The Roadmap is a fine and evolving model for thinking about the metaversed future
- Second life: The stand-in for virtual worlds. It’s the hype. It’s that SL is all we have at the moment.
- Metaphors: Moving out of the current metaphor, keyboard/mouse – Following SL, we’re still in the metaphors provided us throught keyboard/mouse interface.
- Metrics: How do we know what’s going on?
- Lifelogging: The stories that unfold when you can record everything. The devil is in the details.
- Analogies: What’s your analogy for understanding virtual worlds? Like metaphors, the rhetorical and conceptual devices we use are nontrivial.
- Work and virtual worlds: Why sharing digital air is compelling. The bumping-into-ness of virtual worlds, that you just don’t get in video conferences is very relevant for enterprises.
- Embodiment/Presence: What it means to simultaneously inhabit 2 worlds, the physical and digital. — Lots of unanswered and unanswerable human nature questions.
It was great, intellectually stimulating event, and a fun, interactive crowd. I was though disappointed at the lack of opportunities to have conversations. Lot’s of folks attended via SL, and to facilitate a more democratic discussion, those of us live were asked to fill out cards with our questions that would be given to the presenters. It didn’t work really.
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Thanks for posting on this, Suzanne.
Now, I’m not a Luddite by any means, but I find it interesting that the notion of “lifelogging” may be accepted by some (I don’t mean you) rather uncritically. The spate of reality shows and web-based DIY entertainment, while liberating and populist in many ways, has engendered in many (especially younger people) a feeling that they themselves will be famous one day.
When I asked one of my 500-seat lectures, “How many of you think you’ll be famous someday?” about two-thirds raised their hands! This could just be the normal hopes and dreams of your average teenager, sure. But I think the idea that fame in and of itself is attainable, desirable, and an ends-goal (rather than perhaps a by-product) is a bit scary because it creates (what I believe is) an illusionary occupation that is, at best, fleeting, ephemeral, and without substance.
Of course, I’m making the leap between the 24-7 lifelogger and reality television, which may not be a totally sound reasoning leap. But I do think that we should critically question whether we should desire to “log” our lives and what that means–not just for privacy reasons but for our critical thinking skills. I know some people who make astute critical commentaries through regular podcasting and blogging, which I don’t lump together with the phenomenon I’m describing. The idea of this fascinates me for those and other reasons.
The postmodern self–one that is fragmented and doesn’t necessarily adhere to the idea of stable, unified “me”–is not without its existential, ontological pitfalls or dangers.
Kurt I absolutely agree with your points. Lifelogging is likely to become a mass medium of the most personalized kind. I remember myself “wanting to be famous” when I was 18. I wanted to be a rock and roll star.
and pursued it for real. I don’t know how that desire differs from your students. I wonder if their ideas of fame are the same as mine were in 1979? I’m guessing they are, given reality television.