Meeting in First Life

Some thoughts about a "real life" discussion with Jennifer last week...

From the Heverly and Lessig readings, we talked a lot about the shifts between the analog and digital worlds. We wondered whether this shift we are currently experiencing--the shift towards digitality--will be permanent, or just another phase until the next thing?

Digitality seems to be building an architecture that uses an invisible interface for control. Are we using technology's tools? Or is technology using us? Heverly argues that we should be cautious about the ways we invest our physical selves into digital parts. It seems that as digitality grows, we are removing more and more of the physical aspects that define us as humans and communicators. Jennifer and I wondered if the digitality shift suddenly ended for some reason, would we have to begin to "reinvest" ourselves in physical materiality?

As far as the nature of our conversation, we discussed some of the differences the Second Life discussion-group probably would encounter. We agreed that "text capacity" would hinder discussion. If you were to take our conversation and type it out onto paper or screen, it would take up quite a bit of space on the Second Life screen. If there were 5 or 6 people present, it might make detail and depth of conversation limited. A lack of context and direction of conversation also would seem to be problematic. Basic conversation (like that of an IM chat session) would be okay, but for discussing academic texts or in depth conversations, we both felt a medium such as Second Life would diminish the quality of discussion.