New Media, Life and Work Online
Time for a video roundup.
First up: Hitler Explains Second Life.
That was courtesy of Magrathean I believe. Good guys.
Next, DiVAS – Episode #3.
Lastly, Georgia Tech. & Ludwig Maximillian U. bring us some mixed reality goodness in two videos that, together, I’m calling “Second Life’s Invasion Of Reality“.
Oh so cool.
Harper’s voice carries across worlds.
When Linden Lab was first announcing that they were bringing voice to Second Life, it bothered me. Actually, I was ticked right off.
For the most part I was just sick of the grid crashing, massive lag, and an overall disappointing experience around the grid. We kept complaining, and they kept rolling out new features instead of fixing it. Whenever things got really horrible and we turned to the company blog for some kind of acknowledgment of the crisis at hand, we’d hear about Windlight experiments, turning the sun into a big blotch, or bringing voice to the grid. It was infuriating to be ignored so blatantly, so obviously, as if they were teasing us.
A small part of me was worried about something else as well: voice was going to transform the way people in Second Life communicated, and not necessarily for the better.
Much of Second Life’s content and culture has been formed by people who, for one reason or another, flourished in the text-only space. Some are privacy addicts, like Pixeleen Mistral, Editor of the infamous Second Life Herald who simply doesn’t acknowledge requests for voice or any other real-world info. Others, like Torley Linden of Linden Lab or Tateru Nino of Massively, just don’t absorb information through voice nearly as easily as they do through text. Immersionists who have been portraying themselves as a member of the opposite sex aren’t to crazy about it either.
The process of leaving behind the old guard of text-only users has begun, unfortunately. It’s not here yet, but as Tateru commented to me in a recent email: “The percentage of people who won’t speak to me except in voice is slowly increasing. Not quickly, but noticeably.”
The fact is that I’m addicted to voice now, as I knew I would be. Events from Clever Zebra are almost religiously carried on in voice so that we might take video. Without voice, video isn’t a viable medium (and neither are podcasts for that matter).
The public at large are becoming just as addicted. At a recent Metanomics session the audience asked questions using voice. When one person’s voice wasn’t working right, she had Harper Beresford (pictured above) ask the questions on her behalf rather than just typing the question out for the host to read.
Now that we have it, that’s it. As soon as someone starts using voice, they don’t go back.
Of course, now that I’m a user I’m having to suffer from the side-effects that go along with the addiction. It used to be that with a text conversation I could run and grab a cup of tea, or go to the bathroom, come back and catch up on the conversation. No problems.
That’s over now. Our ability to get things done is reduced in a number of ways:
If anything, the augmentation of voice has diminished us somewhat. I wonder if other tools we invent in the future will have a similar effect?
Annie Ok has been creating even more vLES videos, and they’re damn hot. The stream above should update itself automatically as she ads more – there are another 7 videos available as of the time of this writing. Indie music hotness.
My first time shooting video so be kind here…
Death is a hard fact of life to deal with under any circumstances. It’s not surprising, then, that a great deal of effort has been put toward death art and ritual. For those curious about that type of thing I highly recommend the book “Phantasmagoria” by Marina Warner. It’s a fantastic analysis of the various forms of self-expression and artifact preservation people the world over engage in to gain an understanding of death.
Of course, most of us have been to a funeral and, occasionally, witnessed death in the form of a corpse in an open casket. My first such experience was at my grandfather’s funeral. We packed into the small funeral parlor and my grandmother made polite, smiling conversation with guests while standing next to … well … a body. For the most part I just found it strange; my proper and conservative grandmother socializing next to something that, no matter how it was dressed up and made-up, was something you most certainly wouldn’t want hanging around your living room. The dichotomy drove home how powerful a healing experience the whole thing must be to a great many people.
I was recently sent a press release about “Our Lady of The Angels Church”. It’s a cathedral in Second Life, and they’ve recently announced full funeral services. The notice included an open invitation to the funeral of the father of Christopher Whippet (his SL name). It felt a little odd to me that they would be inviting press to a funeral, especially considering it didn’t seem like they were planing some kind of goth-tastic spectacular. It was just a straight-up “we gather to mourn the loss… press welcome”.
When I arrived at the sim I hesitated outside for awhile. I considered staying at a distance from the proceedings and taking pictures from afar, but I was spotted by the funeral director, Leah Corleone, and invited inside.
When I asked her if it was really alright, she told me that it was the bereaved’s idea to call members of the media and that he was putting aside time after the ceremony to talk to us. When I asked Christopher why he wanted attention drawn to his dad’s v-funeral, he said: “because i loved my dad so and want everyone to know what a son would do for his father he loved so much.”
I still felt a little funny about it but I decided to take him at his word. Whether or not you take Christopher’s intentions at face value, “Stanley W.” was a real person in the real world (as seen in the hospital and casket photos). These people had gathered here, in the virtual world, to support their friend. The ritual was being performed.
So in I went.
The elements were all here, but with that v-world twist to them. The nuns were knockouts with ruby-red lips, the priest was a barrel-chested stud, and there were members of the congregation that most certainly weren’t human. In Second Life you tend not to think twice about these things from day to day, but this was a ceremony about a real-world death and so I couldn’t help but take notice.
Otherwise the ceremony was pretty standard. It was a regular Roman Catholic Church approved latin mass, people said “Amen” at the appropriate times (well, typed it into chat), we gathered around the coffin with the 2D flowers on top and the priest anointed it. Friends said kind words. People hugged.
It went very smoothly, due in no small part to the funeral director’s efforts. Her real-world family are in the business, apparently, and she consulted with them heavily in preparation. It paid off.
Is this a sign of things to come? Will the grass next to “Our Lady of The Angels Church” soon become filled with graves and monuments to people who have passed on in the real world?
There’s a good possibility. People have been erecting memorials and having loose remembrance ceremonies in Second Life for a long time now, so this is the next logical step. The v-wedding industry is huge already, so why not v-funerals?
The thing is, something real came out of this as well. Christopher doesn’t leave his home much (long story), and most of his friends are online. If a funeral is how one gains closure, how can he do so when those who might support him are all miles away? Religious ceremonies are symbols of transition from an old way of life to a new one. If that’s the case, this funeral becomes no less legitimate by being held in a virtual world. It makes its mark in the hearts and minds of the participants as potently as it might have had it been held in the real world, carrying the same messages and helping those who need to move on.
After what seemed like a really long wait I finally got a chance to take a spin around vLES. It’s a detailed rendering of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and they just opened up the second Alpha.
The big feature of vLES is in indie chique. Clubs and record stores in the Lower East Side hold the promise of undiscovered independent artists that haven’t yet felt the taint of a studio exec’s attempt to dilute everything down to the lowest common denominator. The audio streams work like they do in vSide, allowing you to rate artists on the fly as you walk around and hopefully bring your favorite indie band closer to the recognition they sorely deserve.
Of course, some just think that independent music is a lot like regular music, but with the added bonus that you get to feel smug about enjoying it. Whatever works for you.
It’s still alpha (read “slightly glitchy”) but I really did like it. Think of vLES as a 20- or 30-something’s vSide. Perhaps it was because this was a faithful rendering of real-world venues, or maybe it was that several of the locales had links to Flickr streams from the real-world counterparts themselves, but hanging out in a bar here really did have that “bar feel” (if there is such a thing). There was a sense to the place that you get when you walk into a bar… like everybody is there to unwind, soak up some entertainment, BS each other about their last girlfriend, go home swearing never to drink again… that kind of thing.
I’m looking forward to seeing the place full. People are going to leave other worlds to come here, and a lot of first-timers will come here and blend in with the oldbies perfectly considering how easy the client is to use. vLES looks like a winner.
My only concern? I’ve never seen anything this comfortable and well-done in a user-created content space. Second Life, There.com and Kaneva all have clubs, but none of them have this kind of interface. Would-be independent v-club owners had better give vLES serious consideration when designing their venues, or face looking completely anachronistic.
