The Importance Of Being Our Own Content Creators

As you'll know if you've read my previous blogs and my occasional rants in the comments section of the Alphaville Herald, ever since content creators began to assume by default that all their customers are thieves intent on ripping them off with Copybot-style programs, I've been pretty vocal about how this is destroying the whole concept of Second Life and turning it into Consumer Life. Also, please note that just because I link to a place where Copybot can be obtained does not mean I condone its use for purposes against the Second Life Terms Of Service - even Wikipedia has a page on Copybot with links to follow so remember that this information is easily accessible by all. I don't believe in censorship to benefit the few and so I provide that information merely so that the reader can make their own informed decisions in life rather than have their choices made for them by others.

Anyway, at the end of the blog I referenced above, I said that I was going to put my money where my mouth is and go out and start learning to become my own content creator and what is more, that I would share that content for free with anyone who wanted it, purely in the hope that they would then take it and improve it and continue to share everything with full permissions. This was intended to bring back the original spirit of Second Life, the spirit of collaborative creation. The rise of the content creators running businesses is in danger of destroying that spirit once and for all. I might not be able to stop it but I'll be damned if I'll support it!

So yes, after a brief break from Second Life due to computer problems, I came back and began to think about how I could begin learning to be a content creator. Building and scripting were the obvious places to start of course. The trick was to decide what to create. I would also need to decide on what skills I needed to learn and where from. Luckily I was able to call on the services of an old friend to give me some advice - take a bow Jessikiti Nikitin! She took me to a sandbox and began teaching me some of the basic tools of building. I'd played with the real basics over time of course but I'd never played further. I was lucky to be able to call on a friend but if an experienced friend isn't available, there are plenty of good classes available for building and scripting. After teaching me some basic tools, she sent me out to play with them and my hexagonal cargo pod was born. I wanted a cargo pod that would look reasonable and have a little control pad that when clicked would list the contents and then issue them to the person who had clicked it. Okay, in overall terms this is seriously beginner level stuff, right? No one is claiming otherwise. The best content creators had to start at the beginning - well, apart from those who stole the work of others that is. Hey, did I just say that out loud? Hehe.

Once I'd built my basic cargo pod (five prims but I think I can get this down to four), I added colour and textures. The textures were all freebies that I'd picked up over time and there are plenty of brilliant resources for free textures and other stuff like sounds too.

Now I needed to create a script that would first list the contents of the pod and then issue those contents. To keep it simple, I kept it to one item for this first attempt. The Nerf Maverick is another freebie I picked up over time. In theory I wanted the project to be completely made from scratch but then cheated and used the freebie gun instead. Future projects will aim to be more scratch-built of course, including textures and sounds.

I'm not entirely unfamiliar with programming of course but I'd never even tried lsl to be honest so this was the biggest bridge to cross. I could have easily just found someone else's script and modified that of course but I like to understand things, not just use them and so I started from scratch on page one of the book so to speak. There are some great resources out there which can help you learn. The Second Life Official Guide has a nice, easy chapter introducing the subject and there's also an entire book on the subject called Scripting Your World. There are other books too of course and it's well worth getting at least one for reference in my opinion. But even just using free online resources like this one and this one will get you scripting in no time. I'd also thoroughly recommend this interactive walkthrough tutorial on the basics of scripting which you can find at this SLurl. It's where I started out and I found it very easy to follow. The authors of Scripting Your World also have an in-world presence that you can visit at this SLurl.

Having decided what I wanted the script to do, it was relatively simple to work out the basic idea and then work out which functions were required. The biggest hurdle I faced was when it came to changing the colours of the faces on the control panel without hiding the texture on the front face. I understand the theory but got lost on working out how to actually write the code correctly because I didn't understand the format required. A quick call to my friend Jessi again and she explained it so I'd understand it and even gave me a little script tool she'd written that would help me out when it came to working out which face was which. The final script can be seen here.

default
{
touch_start(integer total_number)
{
llSetColor(<0.0, 0.0, 0.0>, ALL_SIDES);
llSay(0, "+++CARGO CONTENTS - SMALL ARMS+++");
llSay(0, "+++CHECKING ID+++");
llSay(0, "+++ISSUING CARGO+++");
}
touch_end(integer total_number)
{
llSetColor(<0.0, 0.0, 0.0>, 0);
llSetColor(<0.0, 0.0, 0.0>, 1);
llSetColor(<0.0, 0.0, 0.0>, 2);
llSetColor(<0.0, 0.0, 0.0>, 3);
llSetColor(<1.0, 1.0, 1.0>, 4);
llSetColor(<0.0, 0.0, 0.0>, 5);
llTriggerSound("startrekdoor", 1.0);
llGiveInventory(llDetectedKey(0), "Nerf Maverick (Safe)");
}
}

The next stage was to put it all together and you can see me here, the proud creator of the Space Alien Cargo Pod mk1!


I gave a copy to Jessi and she then rewrote the script to be a little more elegant and passed me a copy of my pod back. I'm now studying her more elegant script so I can further my own knowledge which will help me make better content next time round. I've also given copies to a few other people who I've met while working on the project at the sandbox. I hope they will take it away and improve upon it or at the very least, enjoy it, even if only briefly. Because enjoying it and growing from the collaborative learning process is what content creation in Second Life should be about I believe.

What next? I've already begun sketching out an idea for my next piece of content creation and on top of that I've just installed Blender and Qavimator on my computer so I can gain more knowledge. I've also begun to take some scripting classes in-world and will follow these up with some building classes. And as always, anything I create will be given free and with full permissions to absolutely anyone who would like a copy. It may not be the greatest stuff to ever rez on the grid but it will be created in the hope that at least a few people will remember what Second Life is meant to be about.

Which brings me nicely back to the title of this blog and why it is important for us to be our own content creators. This is supposed to be "our world, our imagination". If we allow others the luxury of dictating what the content of our world is to be, then it becomes "their world, their imagination" and ultimately that means we are merely consumers endlessly circling in someone else's exhibition and shopping mall. I'm sure you can work out how I feel about that ;)

Expectations Of Disclosure

I'm going to start this blog with a quote. It originally came from someone I follow on Twitter and to a degree, it was the origination point of this blog. For obvious reasons, I've removed any identifying text from the quote.

If you do not share your personal data (&identity) you're nobody

What exactly is this saying? Is it saying perhaps that unless we exist as a searchable resource, we don't exist or that our existence is irrelevant? Is it a form of peer pressure attempting to compel us into opening up our lives to those who in previous years would have been known as gossips and nosey neighbours (and treated accordingly) and thus our existence will be ignored? In previous generations, neighbours peering over the garden fence to see what we get up to in private would have been confronted and told to mind their own business. These days, technology has enabled them to dig deeper into our private affairs than ever before but the strange thing is, we are increasingly inviting them to do so!

To some degree, this relates back to my earlier blog about celebrity in the web2.0 generation. As a generation, we are obsessed with our own celebrity, demanding that others pay attention to the minutiae of our lives. In essence, we have turned web2.0 media like Facebook into our own personal special editions of Hello magazine. Because the web2.0 generation is obsessed with its own celebrity, it copies the behaviours of the celebrated. It sees how those celebrities are scrutinised by the public and demands similar scrutiny for itself. The public's obsession with taking on board the quotes of Oscar Wilde in an attempt to approximate his genius for themselves ties in quite nicely here. I believe he was thinking ahead to the web2.0 generation when he famously said:-

"“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”"

So what we have at present is a culture where we increasingly wish to expose ourselves to fulfill our desire for celebrity status and we also have a culture which has decided that it has an expectation on others to allow access and disclosure for entertainment and gratification of curiosity. Such desire for celebrity has been fuelled by the rise in recent years of so-called "reality television", which takes the ordinary man, woman and child in the street and turns them into objects of curiosity to be scrutinised. We stick them in jungles and watch them scream as they eat bugs (I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here). We stick a dozen of them in a little house for three months and watch them fight and argue and have sex (Big Brother). But what these shows do is also allow the everyday person to dream of being that celebrity and thus they seek to find ways to bring it into their own lives. The web2.0 social media allows them to do this.

Consider Amazon wish lists. In theory these are useful, right? People who wish to buy us a present can simply search for our Amazon wish list and select something to have sent to us. Hurrah! Or maybe those very same people can simply look at the contents of your wish list to be nosey about what your tastes are and to pry into things which you may not otherwise have wanted them to know about. That in itself is a major problem and I certainly wouldn't want people having a peek at my Amazon wish list! But then how many people have those wish lists open to being publicly searchable because they want people to view them and find things to talk about? Again, are we not seeing another example of the web2.0 generation's obsession with self-celebrity? "If people are searching for me and talking about aspects of my life, then I must be important". People use every possible tool to expose and spread their lives, commodifying their existence and literally whoring themselves for the celebrity that the web2.0 generation will give them. But then as I pointed out in my previous blog - no one is looking at you because everyone is having their own fifteen minutes of Warholian fame at the exact same time.

It's also worth noting that the social networks themselves are pushing these viewpoints. In a recent blog, the comments of Facebook spokesman, Barry Schnitt were analysed:-

"Facebook is encouraging users to share their updates because, he said, that was in line with "the way the world is moving". But the important differentiator is that these changes are more in line with how Facebook wants the world to move forward, not necessarily how its users want the world to move forward.

As blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick said, this is not what Facebook users signed up for. This issue isn't about privacy for Facebook, it's about increasing traffic and the visibility of activity on the site."

Even Google (have I mentioned at all that I hate Google? I hate Google but that's for another blog) have attempted to belittle anyone who tries to defend their privacy against this growing expectation of disclosure that they are forcing into people's lives for their own profit but again, that's for another blog. Mozilla, the publishers of the Firefox web browser have recently turned against Google because of concerns about Google's attitudes to privacy. In a recent comment, Google's Eric Schmidt said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" as reported in this editorial. Can you see how this is implying that only those with something to hide fear surveillance - "the innocent have nothing to fear" is the cry of an oppressive state. And while that's not the purpose of this blog, I will add the following point because it is relevant to the subject. Although I wrote it, it's from a different blog and so I'll treat it as a quote:-

"The web2.0 generation and its increasingly interconnected nature, is a police state's dream come true. If a government demanded we supply details of every aspect of our existence right down to our most private thoughts and interactions, we'd riot in the streets. But instead, web2.0 puts all this data into the public domain and what's more we do it willingly. In this day and age, if you *don't* have a Facebook page, you're an outcast! Isn't that ironic? I myself have witnessed conversations in my workplace where people have asked what another person's Facebook page is. Note that I said "what it is" i.e. they acted upon the assumption that this person would have one by default rather than asking "whether" they had one and they have also acted on the assumption that their friend request would be accepted so that they could pry into your personal life. I've also had discussions where people have declared that anyone who doesn't publish their lives in the social media is some kind of freak. There is a growing culture of expectation of disclosure and I don't believe it's healthy."

Even companies are now expecting access to the social networking sites of their employees as you can see from this example and this example. Is this expectation of disclosure acceptable? I don't believe it is.

We're also seeing an expectation of reciprocal disclosure. I myself have come across many examples of people who have in effect said to me "I have exposed my personal details to you and I expect the same from you in return". That may have been true if there was an agreement to do so of course. But if someone chooses to disclose their personal details to me it won't be because I've asked them or wanted them to. Ask me to disclose my personal details and I'll thank you for your interest and decline on the grounds of being quite dull really and surely of no real interest. If you push further, I'm make up something plausible and yet mostly false. I always say I'm WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) but the truth is I'm also WYSIWIWYTS (What You See Is What I Want You To See).

So, to return to the title of this blog. What we now have is a public with an expectation of disclosure on the individual. But we also have the individual who expects to disclose. I don't believe that my life and its content should be a publicly viewable resource in the same way that I don't believe my computer's hard drives and the data they contain should be a publicly searchable resource and I believe that any entity which pushes the idea should be questioned as to motive. I'm going to leave you with one thought and I really hope it scares the crap out of you.

We're told that identity theft is a major crime in the modern world. But is it possible that we're heading into the situation where identity ownership will become the crime?

Metaplace - Some Initial Observations

I have to confess, I originally joined the Metaplace cyberspace back in May of 2009 and have been an occasional visitor ever since (though mostly only to see specific events rather than for general exploration). So it seems a little odd that it's only now that I'm writing down some initial observations! It just seemed the right time to put down some thoughts so let's see what we can find to say about Metaplace.

Avatar creation is simple enough in Metaplace although frankly the options available are almost pointless. This is simply due to the fact that once you are inworld, the size of your avatar means that your avatar's appearance is lacking in any real detail. You can at least zoom in using your mouse wheel which is a benefit not shared by Blue Mars as I discussed here although when you zoom in, the detail of your avatar becomes heavily pixellated. That being said, I did what I could to recreate Senban as much as I could.


After a useful tutorial on how to function in this cyberspace, you're let out to fend for yourself. One thing you'll notice that's different to Second Life is the way you get money (called coins). You get money for adding friends, money for visiting places, money for finding the golden egg hidden in each place, money for leaving comments about each place. Like Second Life you can also buy inworld currency using your credit card but as you can get a lot of money just by wandering round, this doesn't seem necessary. Because each location seems to turn into a game of Hunt The Golden Egg, it's impossible to avoid comparing this cyberspace to the computer games of the eighties and nineties. Given that you can attain levels that unlock new capabilities (like being able to run instead of just walking), it's again impossible to avoid comparisons. In fact I'd personally go so far as to say that Metaplace is a gameplay-based cyberspace and not a virtual world in the sense of say Second Life. I would even go so far as to say that Metaplace has more in common with Zwinky than with Second Life and indeed it shares a great many characteristics with that cyberspace, although it does have far superior graphics to Zwinky.

Much as I pointed out when I discussed Blue Mars in this blog, Metaplace has the amazingly annoying method of putting people's chat in speech bubbles.

One thing I've noticed with some surprise about Metaplace is that there is a casual violence towards lower lifeforms built in and encouraged. Metaplace is populated with cute-little furry things called Meeps. There are in fact a variety of these based on size and colour.


These again give the impression of computer games of the type where ghosts chase you round a maze and in fact I even found a dungeon maze where red Meeps would chase you round while you attempted to collect treasure chests. If they caught you, you screamed and died, splashing blood across the floor which was surprising given the fact that Metaplace seems to be aimed towards a younger demographic.


But as I say, there isn't just the violence of red Meeps towards you - you are actively encouraged to treat the blue Meeps with similar casual violence. For example, near Metaplace Central you can buy a blue Meep from a vending machine for 25 coins and throw it to a shark in the sea nearby - the shark thrashes around and blue blood stains the water.


I also found a desert region where you could load blue Meeps into a cannon and shoot them across the terrain until they hit something with a large green splat!


The overriding culture of Metaplace seems to me to be geared towards creating a user-generated game universe, a next generation Zwinky as it were and in that sense I'd say it succeeds because almost every area I visited had little games that could be played, if indeed the whole area was not set up as a game such as Zoo Escape which mimics the gameplay of the classic arcade game Frogger. But for anyone to consider it a valid virtual world along the lines of Second Life, Blue Mars or There is an attempt to take it out of one market (in which it succeeds) and to place it in another (in which it can't help but be considered a relative failure). Metaplace is an interesting place to visit from the viewpoint of metaverse exploration and it's an interesting stage in the development of cyberspaces but I don't believe it has a future beyond what it was apparently created to do. Yes, it has the benefit of being able to embed worlds inside ordinary web pages and yes, it's possible to interact with objects inside those worlds which enable you to browse a seller's items but ultimately these are mere side issues to the main business of this world, no matter how many articles are written by the Alphaville Herald attempting to make it seem more serious than it is. Does it have the potential to include more serious issues and break away from the user-generated gameworld impression? Can it become more than a mere point-and-click adventure game? Perhaps and developers are no doubt working on it but right now I think Metaplace is having trouble preventing people from running round shouting "paku paku paku" while eating power pills and looking for Mario and Donkey Kong.

The Belonging Kind

Imagine being in a nice bar, sitting next to someone and you strike up a conversation.


Somehow everything is perfect, like something from a movie. You find yourself fascinated by that person, so much so that when they leave a little while later, you find yourself following them down the street towards another club. This time it's a jazz club. And then as you watch, that person transforms before your very eyes, shedding clothes and hair and taking on a whole new appearance and way of moving. They look and move like completely different people but somehow you *feel* in your bones that it's the same person. You can't explain it, you just *know*.


At this new bar, you don't speak to the person. What would you even say that wouldn't make you sound crazy? So you just stand and watch as she talks to some guy. You watch as she hands over some money to the bartender to pay for some drinks and yet she never reached into a pocket or a purse to get the money; it was just suddenly there in her hand, like it had sprouted from her palm. Before long, you're following her down the street again, watching her head for another bar, a light airy place this time where people always seem cheery. You're not even surprised this time as you watch the light shimmer across her hair, changing it from dark brown to a light red, watching as her clothes morph into a light summery green dress. Her movements change from the slinkiness of the jazz club to a bubbly excitement. And yet again, against the evidence of your own eyes, you *know* it's the same person.


You watch as she dances with a few people, shares some drinks yet never appears to get intoxicated. What *is* this person? It gnaws at you, you have to know! You follow her again as she ducks down the street, morphing as she goes (can no one else see this?!?!?) Now wearing a green top and black shorts and boots, her movements have become almost aggressive as she ducks into a local bar known for being a bit rowdy, her long brown hair flowing behind her as she passes inside. The loud rock music almost deafens you as you strain to hear her conversation with the man at the bar. You catch fragments of the discussion - something about a TV show - but somehow you *know* there's something else going on. That somehow, on some level there's a whole other layer of communication between these two, that somehow they are communing beneath the perceptions of most people. But somehow *you* are aware of this.


The above is a heavily borrowed idea from the short story "The Belonging Kind", written by William Gibson and published in the Burning Chrome anthology which I can't recommend enough.


So what's the point of this? I recently read this story again and was struck by the way it reflected everyday Second Life activities on so many levels. As we move between locations we alter our avatars in so many ways. We change clothes, hair, skin, shape, animation overriders, everything. And yet someone viewing us would know it was us regardless because of our name tag over our head. And even if that wasn't present, they could click on us to read our profile. We literally adapt ourselves as we move through cyberspace, becoming the right shape to fit where we are and who we are with. To borrow a phrase from the story itself, we become the personification of conformity.

And what about the money appearing as if from nowhere? We rez things in Second Life, causing them to appear out of the ether. In the story, it was money and a hotel room key but in Second Life we create whole buildings out of thin air, as if we had them behind our back just waiting to be brought out. It's the same with drinking alcohol in Second Life; we can "drink" all night and yet not show any effects. In the original story, the creatures created money and hotel keys from inside themselves, slits opening in their bodies to allow biologically created objects to slide out.

And what about the couple sitting at the bar talking? In our situation, we knew that there was something going on beneath the surface. How often have we held conversations both in public chat and in IM? An observer might sense that something was going on that he wasn't aware of. In the story, it turned out that the two were actually mating through their slight contact. How many avatars sit in a public space like a bar appearing to have a regular conversation and yet in IM they're busily having cybersex outside our perception?

"Her hip was touching his, just a little. They didn't seem to be speaking, but Coretti felt they were somehow communing."

In the original story, the main character Coretti watches the strange woman who he comes to know as Antoinette and ultimately realises that he too is one of these strange creatures, creatures that he finds roosting in a hotel room. We never find out what "the belonging kind" actually are. Maybe they were avatars.....

With thanks to Jessikiti Nikitin, Invictus Berthold and Tiffany Ahren for their kind assistance in preparing this blog :)

Filling The Big Empty Spaces

Anyone who has spent any time in Second Life will no doubt have noticed that there are a lot of big empty spaces with nothing in them. In a similar vein, you've probably visited sims which are like ghost towns, deserted shopping malls and clubs and so on. Some people choose to use such things to back up their arguments that Second Life is failing or that Second Life is dull with nothing to do.

How wrong they are!

Let's take those sims with big empty spaces first. Why are they empty? Well partly, there may be a technical reason in some cases. Each sim can only handle a certain amount of content so if the sim's content is concentrated in just one area of the sim then yes, there will be big empty spaces in the rest of the sim. To a degree we can also look at social reasons for lots of empty space in a sim. People will naturally cluster in one area on account of wanting to socialise with other people. So if a sim has a natural cluster point such as a seating area, an infohub, camping/lucky chairs and so on, then naturally other parts of the sim will be mostly deserted. And if there's no one visiting those parts of the sim, why put content there?

Another technical reason for sims appearing empty is actually so obvious that I'm amazed more people don't realise it for themselves. Look at this photo of a dull, uninteresting, empty sim. It almost looks like Siberian tundra, frozen wasteland with patches of standing water (if you ever get a chance to fly over that terrain by the way, do it because the vast empty spaces are humbling).


This photo was taken with the graphics slider set to "Low". It's actually quite common for residents of Second Life to move around with their preferences set this way, usually due to their computers being relatively low-capability. Vast empty sim, nothing to do, right? Watch this!


The exact same landscape only this time every possible graphics option is turned up to ten so to speak. Suddenly that sim isn't quite as empty as people would have you think! Suddenly the landscape is blossoming with things to see and explore. So, before we continue to explore this blog's topic, perhaps already we can start to question whether claims of vast empty sims are necessarily true, don't you think?

As an aside, many people who keep their graphics settings at the lower end of the scale do so because for the most part, the majority of their Second Lives are spent dealing with other avatars at arm's reach and so don't need their draw distance set to 512m.

Now, let's think about those deserted shopping malls that we're always hearing about. Isn't this actually a mirror of meatspace? How many shopping malls in meatspace closed down or lost business because in the 21st century we buy everything from online companies such as Amazon? So if people in meatspace don't want to traipse round shopping malls as much as they once did, why do we expect them to do so in cyberspace? Shopping malls are empty because people are buying from online sources such as XstreetSL and Slapt instead. That's actually sort of ironic because people are in effect going online to get away from a shopping experience which in itself is online.

So the ghost town shopping malls we hear so much about are in reality just a reflection of meatspace and in fact represent the inability of their creators to adapt to changing markets. It's not a failure of Second Life; it's a failure of certain residents' business models and perhaps also their business practices. We can also go further and point out that at the time of writing there is a global recession and that this is a contributing factor.

Okay, here's the thing. Now that we've covered some minor points, let's get to the real message here. People complain about the fact that there are empty spaces. But in return I ask "what are YOU doing to fill those spaces?" People complain that there is a lack of fresh content. But in return I ask "what are YOU doing to create content for your world?"

The problem is this. And if I'm honest, it's a problem that really makes me grind my teeth. People treat Second Life as if it's a theme park. They walk in the gate and then expect scripted content all laid out for their enjoyment. They expect their entire experience to have been created and planned out for them. Now bearing in mind that to get into a theme park you usually have to pay for a ticket so perhaps there's a legitimate expectation of a reasonable amount of content, right? But the people complaining about lack of content in Second Life are almost always USING FREE ACCOUNTS! So in effect they are getting a free pass into a theme park and then complaining about the lack of rides. Can you see the irony in this?


The problem is that Second Life is NOT a theme park for us to visit. The famous tagline is "Your world, your imagination". As such, Second Life is nothing but a mirror of who and what we are. Consider those big empty spaces again. If we went into a theme park and saw big empty spaces where we expected to see rides then we might have cause for complaint. But in this reflection of our own personalities and social structures, those big empty spaces in fact mirror a lack of content in our own selves and in our own societies. When we see big empty spaces we shouldn't be complaining! We should be going "wow, how can I fill that space?" But people aren't doing this.

People are expecting to arrive inworld and be fed other people's content and tomorrow they expect fresh content to keep them interested. In that sense, I can understand the frustrations of Second Life's content providers because they deserve fair reward for the effort they put into creating content for everyone else to enjoy. But what we really need to do is to turn everyone into their own content provider rather than passive consumers. Of course the people who use Second Life as a business platform don't want us all creating our own content because if we start to do that, if we start to fill our own big empty spaces with content that we're making for ourselves, then we're not paying them to do it for us. But the sooner we do this, the sooner Second Life will stop being a theme park and start being OUR WORLD, OUR IMAGINATION again.

Next time you see an empty space in Second Life, don't passively sit back and expect others to fill it. Ask what YOU can do to fill that space. This is YOUR world and YOUR imagination - start acting like it. Go to a sandbox and try playing with the building tools. Take a scripting class. Better yet, buy the books "Creating Your World" and "Scripting Your World" and get a proper skill base. Download a free copy of Qavimator and try creating your own animations. It's hard work! But the first time you see something you've created actually happen inworld, you'll be thrilled and want to go further.

It's Only Meat

As any of my friends can attest, I'm something of a fan of William Gibson. The more I read his work, the more I notice small points that I'd previously missed. Given that these points often relate to the metaphysical aspects of cyberspace and meatspace, they fascinate me as you can imagine.

I remember many years ago when I first bought the Neuromancer graphic novel and, although it wasn't quite the imagery in my head when reading the original book, it brought the story into a visual format which added a new layer for me.


One of the lines of the graphic novel that stuck in my head from the very first reading were from the scene when Molly and Case go to the knife fights. Here's the specific panel so you can see it for yourself.


"It's only meat"

Before we go further, just to give context, here's the next panel so you can understand just what form these "knife fights" actually took. Giant holographic avatars projected into the space above the knife fighters so that the audience in the vast gladiatorial arena can see the action. Of course the audience isn't watching the actual combatants, only their avatars.


So, let's return to Molly's comment.

"It's only meat".

It's a strange thing to say and it could be interpreted a number of ways.

Perhaps Molly is expressing a lack of empathy for other human beings? "It's only meat" could refer to an opinion that other human beings are mere cattle and that as such they don't deserve her empathy. Certainly a casual reader could easily come to this conclusion due to the fact that Molly is in effect a cybernetic assassin, a "razor girl" who kills quite calmly. In fact just after they enter the knife fight stadium, she kills a street thug who is about to attack Case with a knife and doesn't appear to bat an eyelid.

But someone who digs a little deeper into the character could perhaps read her words differently. Is it possible that Molly is actually expressing an opinion that anything that happens to the physical body, such as being cut by a knife, is actually unimportant because "it's only meat"? This is actually a rather deep argument.

If we assume for a second that the flesh and blood body is merely an avatar for our consciousness, just like our pixel avatars are, then we're getting into deep water. People often say "it's only pixels" when referring to someone's avatar in say Second Life, the implication being that it is of no importance. But if the vehicle of our consciousness is of no importance then surely the same must apply to our meat avatars?

And so suddenly we can read Molly's statement of "it's just meat" as "what happens in the knife fight is of no importance because the person themselves isn't harmed, only the avatar".

But now we're also getting into the realms of social commentary! Look again at the second image from the graphic novel, showing the huge holographic avatars. The actual people are miniscule dots in the far distance. In fact we can't even see the physical people so how do we know they are even there? Perhaps Molly's statement of "it's only meat" is actually an expression of the distance that the audience is at from the reality. For the audience, the avatars *are* the combatants! There is no human element for them to empathise with. Indeed is this so far removed from the fact that for many of us in the opening years of the 21st century, reality is the avatars we view on our television screens and that we are becoming disconnected from the fact that real people are (or were) at the other end of that communication?

For comparison, consider Case, a console jockey who manoeuvers through cyberspace. In the cyberspace of Gibson's world, we see a consensual hallucination, data is represented by three dimensional structures that can be manipulated. Case's world is in effect one of dealing with avatars. Case does not see money for example. He might see a green cube that represents the data that represents the money. As such he is disconnected from the essence of the money, in much the same way that Molly and the audience could be said to be disconnected from the essence of the huge holographic avatars projected over the stadium.

Finally, this also raises the question of the way people treat other people in cyberspaces like Second Life. "It's only pixels" is used as the justification for acting badly, for saying terrible things. We would never do such things when face to face with a person and yet we do them when faced with that person's avatar. Does that not also indicate a disconnection between ourselves and the essence of who we are dealing with?

Does it even matter if "it's only meat"?

Hidden Spaces

Every day, we experience the surface of our personal bubbles and it's very rare that anything moves us to go beyond those bubbles. Sometimes we find ourselves accidentally pushing past the surface of our bubbles and making new discoveries as we do so. That's fantastic of course! But it's not enough to then go back inside our bubbles and wait for more accidents. We need to develop the mindset of deliberately exploring beyond our bubbles. We need to develop our thinking so that rather than simply seeing "surface", we also start to think in broader terms of 'beneath', 'above', 'behind', 'before', 'after', 'instead of', 'inside', 'outside', 'alongside' and so on.

So where am I going with this and why was this blog entitled "Hidden Spaces"?

Too often, when traversing cyberspace, we forget that it is alive with the expressions of countless individuals and groups. Each individual and group will leave a flavour of itself in the places it inhabits.

From the original creators, we pass through generations of new residents, each moving in, leaving something of themselves before moving on and being replaced by a new generation who will add their own layers above, alongside and beneath the existing layers, perhaps now abandoned. Even if a generation doesn't leave a layer, the absence of a layer is in itself a layer in broad terms. Perhaps the addition of those new layers creates pockets of abandoned space that become forgotten.

Consider this picture. It's a shame that it can't show the subject more adequately because the hidden space I'm sitting in is huge. A vast man-made cavern beneath a sim and just a stone's throw from a heavily-trafficked infohub yet I'm betting that very few people know this space is even there. It appears to be the remains of the original sim that stood here, a forgotten space that in meatspace might be dusty, cobwebbed and inhabited by rats but of course here in cyberspace, it's like the original creator only left a few moments ago. There's no way to fly or walk into this hidden space. It's only accessible through a little sleight-of-hand. There's nothing down there of direct interest. Only the very fact of its existence is of interest.


Then consider this picture. Now that I have a PC that is literally on the verge of artificial intelligence of the kind that declares war on humanity and gives rise to a series of movies, I can run Second Life with every possible setting on maximum and not experience any problems. I'm not saying that to boast you understand, rather to point out that by having the draw distance constantly set to 512m rather than the default 96m, it enables me to notice things in the distance that I may have walked past a thousand times and never seen. In this case, I was wandering through one of my regular haunts when I noticed something jutting from the waves offshore. Taking a deep breath I plunged through the surf and after a little swimming (I hadn't even realised that my animation overrider had swimming animations - do you honestly even know if yours does and what they look like?) I was amazed to discover that beneath the waves was a whole field of shipwrecks! There was a midget submarine, there was a sailing ship, there was cargo strewn across the ocean floor. Manta rays and eels and fishes swam beneath the hulks. And yet no one would normally come out here. This hidden space, this hidden expression was so far off the beaten track in this world of flight and teleportation that I imagine very few people would ever come here and see these things. And yet there they lie, beneath the waves, created by someone who felt the need to express themselves this way.

Of course, I understand that it's not always possible to run around with our draw distance on maximum just in case we spot something unusual. But can I suggest that once in a while, you take a moment to stand still and set your draw distance to maximum. Let your machine catch up with itself and then just look around and see some of the things you'd normally not have seen. Maybe you'll find something that's worth investigating :)


Finally for now, while exploring recently, I came across a small glade at the foot of a hill covered in Buddhist and Shinto iconography. As I wandered through the glade, I suddenly heard a goat's bleat and then out of the mist came a goat! Why? Why in what was effectively a religious retreat was a goat wandering round? Cyberanimals and the behaviours they exhibit fascinate me and the subject was even part of my recent studies. And here was a goat, happily enjoying life in perhaps the last place I expected to find one. Someone out there put this goat here because to do so meant something to that person. Second Life is full of such things but rarely do we notice and even more rarely do we try to understand why someone did something like this in their little hidden space.


One further type of hidden space I've found is graffiti. Not graffiti in the sense that we might see it in meatspace of course because build/mod permissions mostly prevent us from changing the textures in say a wall to create the generational metascrawls we see in meatspace. The kind of graffiti I'm referring to is more along the lines of builders' marks; messages left behind in hidden angles and in the spaces between prims by the original builders. I've found several examples of these marks, mostly just used as a tag to show "I built this" although sometimes the tag is used to present a message to the reader, should one ever find the hidden element.

In a sense, what we're talking about is cyberarcheology. We can look at the abandoned spaces left behind by previous generations and perhaps understand something about who those people were and how they thought.

As a final point, why not apply this thinking to your meatspace lives? Take a moment to look around you and work out how everything fits together and then work out what's in the spaces inbetween. In a sense, this borrows from the thinking behind urban exploration so that should give you an idea of how to proceed. Much like changing the draw distance settings, all it really takes is a fresh pair of eyes and to be willing to push outside our personal bubbles.