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

It doesn't matter if you live in Hong Kong, Singapore or Sydney, you would have heard about the revolution of on-line gamers and the virtual worlders and their humanoid avatars. They say there's big money to be made by getting online now. The PR spin coming out of Linden Corp, the creators of Second Life, and one of the most popular of the virtual worlds, is astounding.

It's time to take out this intellectual trash.

Most people welcome the fantastic technological break-troughs in electronic communication in the last 20 years (although my email inbox groans under the sheer volume of messages). While I have some doubts about the quality of some of that information, I have also witnessed the parabolic growth in hype associated with modern communications.

A Sydney “cyber academic”, Lauren Papworth, said, “it (online game playing) is an escape born of necessity for the young. In the modern world, parks and streets are considered too dangerous for games or meeting friends and fretting parents insist their precious offspring spend more time indoors than out.”

They're going to be better off learning to play guitar, lacrosse, karate, cricket, soccer or chess than sitting alone in a darkened bedroom battling god-knows-what coming at them in 3D through their computer screen.

“The growth experienced by the computer industry doesn't seem to be coming at the expense of book sales in Australia, and that's fascinating. I would argue that computer games, being fairly text-heavy with their complex plots and instructions require literacy, traditional literacy,” said Peter Lalor, in The Australian recently (September 21).

So computer games are good for childhood or teenage literacy because they have to read the instructions? Pigs might fly. The fields of imagination are greenest when one is allowed to travel through literature unguided, rather than be directed by a computer programmer's vision.

Let's cut to the chase. Many “cyber academics” make the astounding claim that the medium of online virtual worlds, such as Second Life, is reality. So virtual worlds are as real as you and me. That's right: conception, love, sadness, ecstasy, reflection, and death. The whole existential merry-go-round.

That's a big claim. One argument goes like this. Cyber worlds are forms of life just as works of art are more than the sum of the materials that comprise them. And here's where they introduce the linguistic slight of hand. Therefore, all thinking is virtual because it stands apart from the object in question.

If all thinking is virtual, then cyberspace (which is nothing more than a mass of networks) must also be virtual and is simply a part, by extension, of human consciousness.

This type of thinking means that when I go fishing, my fishing rod and me form an irreducible bond of “oneness” simply because in order to go fishing, I need my fishing rod.

There's nothing about thinking that is virtual. One can try describe it in terms of metaphors such as consciousness operates like a machine, an organism or a hologram, but whatever consciousness is - that most defining mark of the human race - it isn't virtual. It's primary, apparent and real. The brilliant Scottish philosopher David Hume, who had problems proving the existence of reality, admitted that it “does seem pretty concrete”.

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.

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.

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.”

There can be no doubt that 3D animation and multimedia in general has been an incredible tool for medical diagnostics, architecture and for the computer gaming industry. A number of surgeons use electronic 3D models to practice complex operations online but they also attend real operations and assist.

Airline pilots undergo many hours of 3D simulations to achieve and keep flight status yet they must also log up the requisite amount of real flying time with another pilot or co-pilot. Note that pilots don't log up many hours of real flying time so they can perfect their techniques in the simulator.

The notion of creating avatars (how like God) and buying and grooming avatar pets, going to a cyber bar to meet fellow avatars, is excellent news for teenagers or the teenager in us that won't go away. But lets call them for what they are - entertainment. There are now more than 100 online universes. There's a universe offering something for everyone.

Neil Postman's central thesis in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death - Public Discourse in the World of Show Business (1985), was right. Very little serious intellectual exchange has taken place through a medium, which is more akin to a fashion show or the intellectual equivalent of a disco.

The famous aphorism that states that “data isn't information, information isn't knowledge and knowledge isn't wisdom” has never been truer.