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Virtual worlds - it's time to take out the intellectual trash

By Malcolm King - posted Wednesday, 5 December 2007


In Second Life the players are living in the program designer's world. The players are engaged in what sci-fi novelist William Gibson called “the consensual hallucination of cyberspace”.

One of the great flaws in recent thinking (excluding the sciences) has been the assigning of deduction to the rubbish bin. By this I mean, A+B no longer equals C, thereby allowing some twits to confuse the “consensual hallucination of cyberspace” with reality. It's a major flaw that dogs not only Australian universities but those in America and UK.

My 10-year-old niece clearly knows the difference between virtual worlds and the apparent pressing material world. By switching off her computer I have acted - if only temporarily - as Kali, destroyer of virtual worlds. If you don't have that flow of electrons, you're not even history. You're nothing.

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My favourite in-world “proof” for the reality of virtual worlds is nicked from Watson and Crick, the discoverers of DNA (not forgetting Rosalind Franklin either). Some virtual worlders say that all life in-world is made up of mathematical code much the same as the protein ribbons of the double helix. Therefore avatars are “alive”.

Can happiness be found in the arms of a warm avatar? I'm feeling the “consensual hallucination of cyberspace” coming on.

It's hard to say where or when deduction went out the window. I used to jokingly blame Fritjof Capra and The Tao of Physics who said that particle theory was Zen-like in its construction. He was talking about the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. What he was actually doing was employing a metaphor to suggest that sub atomic particles/wave action displayed some Zen-like qualities.

On the other side of the ledger we had the post structuralists saying that language was nothing more than the application of signifiers to objects and further, any meaning we gave to texts (especially literary texts although some took this further to scientific texts) was essentially subjective. If you had trouble understanding that last sentence, you're not alone. Basically it meant that everything was up for grabs.

The rise of virtual worlds is exciting for faddist academics. The fall of the humanities and the decline of post structuralism meant that some academics who once taught journalism or media studies, started writing articles on the “metaphysics of virtual worlds”, “eros in virtual worlds” and someone even had a crack at “ontology of virtual worlds” - but ended up in a mess of 3D object equations.

Academics talk about the existence of “social space” in cyberspace. It's hard to pin them down on this as there is no syllogism in any social science or philosophical referenced journal that supports this position.

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You actually need to prove that 3D on-line communication, without the recognition of context, voice, scent, touch and body language, constitutes a “social space”. I believe it's an electronic phantasmagoria, which is highly entertaining but a poor medium to discuss matters of academic import. It's the stuff of carnival.

Academics are barking up the wrong tree if they think virtual worlds will provide kudos and tenure. The online world of carnival is the world of entertainment and gratification. It is not the place for serious dialogue.

As Tara Brabazon said in Digital Hemlock - Internet Education and the Poisoning of Teaching, (2002) “If we are satisfied, we do not agitate for change. If we are satisfied, we do not need to think. Satisfaction breeds mediocrity, compliance and banality ... Dissatisfaction breeds questioning, agitation and research.”

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This article was published in the November edition of the Adelaide Review.



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About the Author

Malcolm King is a journalist and professional writer. He was an associate director at DEEWR Labour Market Strategy in Canberra and the senior communications strategist at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide. He runs a writing business called Republic.

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