BBC Examines the Metaversal Self
IBM’s Ian Hughes (aka Second Life’s epredator Potato) flags a segment of the BBC Newsnight’s Geek Week 2.0 that examines the nature of the self in cyberspace. The 11-minute segment (click the virtual death link) is a really interesting examination of what it means to inhabit a metaversal presence, and well worth watching. (Second Life appears after about 7 minutes, for the fanbois out there who don’t want to watch the whole thing.)
The BBC presenter eventually argues to the point that the ascendance of virtual worlds may be a moment similar to the beginning of the Renaissance, when, as one anonymous commenter puts it (and I’m paraphrasing in these quotes), “there was the realization that the old ways of looking at the world were insufficient to the questions and tasks of the future.” The segment gets there by examining the mind/body split, the current lack of a “cosmology of the self,” and the fact that cyberspace may take the self, as separate from someone’s physical existence, more seriously. The segment perhaps errs by casting places like Second Life as somehow “more real” than the real world, but its basic argument is very sound: that we may be able to learn about ourselves by watching our behavior in virtual spaces, and that they may lend new steam and new insights into the nature of self. Check it out, and let us know what your self (any of them) thinks of all this.
Feeds
Were you able to get the video to play? I got a message saying that it could only be viewed by UK residents.
It definitely played for me, on both my Mac and my PC.
I didn’t think the reporter was saying that cyberspace was ‘more real” than the physical world, I think he was saying that cyberspace allows us to explore and express aspects of the self that we cannot explore elsewhere, which, combined with with our physical experisnce, gives a more honest and truthful reflection of the who we are, which I would agree with.
Unfortunate the commentators weren’t credited… I would liked to have followed them up. And that woman sounded like an Aussie, like me!
Weird, no luck at all on my Windows Box (using Media Player), but reinstalling Real on the Mac did the trick! I also liked the Pixies music used throughout the piece.
ooh, that’s right. I had meant to mention the Pixies music, actually, but then forgot. It is ace, isn’t it?
Sean: The commentators were:
Dr Lisbeth Klastrup
IT University Copenhagen
Margaret Wertheim
Author, “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace”
John Stephenson
Online genealogist
Ian Hughes (epredator Potato)
Metaverse Evangelist, IBM
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