General

Rad raised a question yesterday in the EmbodiedResearch group on the subject of how to differentiate the real world from the virtual world. That sparked a lively debate which has been echoing in my head overnight and which underscores the different perspectives we have in the group.

For me, the idea of “differentiate” isn’t necessarily clear. I *reference* the two spaces as “meat space” and “cyber space” to denote an artificial distinction between, say, a building on my campus and a house in Second Life. This differentiation is necessary because we use the word “building” in both contexts and it sometimes needs context setting in order to be made clear.

But the argument of “real vs virtual” is a meaningless construct for me. The confusion results from a semantic confusion of the computer term “virtual” and the English word “virtual” which have different and distinct meanings.

When used as a modifier in communications and computer contexts, like “virtual machine” and “virtual world,” the word virtual means “mediated by computer” and has no bearing on the philosophical notion of “reality.” In communications contexts, the term applied as in “virtual world” connotes akin to the name of a communications channel.

When used as an English term, like “virtual prison” or “virtual angel,” the term is rooted in the word “virtue” and can be restated to something like “a prison by virtue of having many of the characteristics of a prison” or “an angel by virtue of having many of the characteristics of an angel.” The idea is that the reference isn’t to a “real” thing, but something — by definition — other than the real — it’s not a “real prison” or a “real angel.” While the temptation is to extrapolate that meaning into the computer context, the reality is that this usage requires a comparative entity. We need a construct like “the school was a virtual prison” or “Jenny was a virtual angel” in order for the phrase to have any contextual meaning.

The temptation is to transfer that usage into “Second Life is a virtual world” and I believe that this is the confounding semantic trap that most people fall into. While it’s certainly a valid sentence to restate it as “Second Life is a world by virtue of having the characteristics of a world,” the notion of “real or not” is automatically void. That construct requires “not real” as a predicate. Clearly this is not the context in which we need to deal with “virtual world.”

I maintain that the idea of “virtual world” is more akin to “telephone” and names a communications channel. In this context a channel is not necessarily “a medium” but more like some aggregated notion of media, technology, and pathway. The telephone is a good comparison to Second Life in this regard. Familiarity with phone leads us to overlook some realities of the channel, however. We use a variety of technologies – spoken language, audio encoding/decoding, analog or digital transmission, etc – to connect two or more people. The concept of “real or not” never comes into play. We don’t have a “virtual conversation” on the phone. Your relationship with your mother on the phone is as real as it is when you are in the same room with her in spite of the reality that you are not hearing your mother’s real voice on the phone, but rather a decoded simulation of her voice created when the sound waves from her vocal cords hit the diaphragm in her phone and are converted to some other form for transmission to your location, and are then recreated mechanically for you to interpret. Of course it’s not REALLY her voice. The construct has no meaning because the notion of reality isn’t relevant to the larger notion of the conversation you’re having with your mum by using the channel called “telephone.”

Likewise the question of reality in dealing with Second Life is a meaningless construct. In the same sense that your mother’s voice is not real when you hear it on the phone, the messages — graphic, audio, whatever — you get from Second Life are not real. It’s not a physical house, nor a physical body, but rather a digital construct that’s used for transmitting a message in the same way that laughter, sighs, and inflections are audio constructs used for transmitting a message on the phone.

With that as a given, I believe the interesting questions about SL are still surrounding the messages we send, the negotiations we make — explicitly and implicitly — over the nature of the conversation, and how we choose to use the capabilities of the channel to send messages. Even questions of “what constitutes a message” have a certain interest. But the idea of “real or not” when applied to SL — for me — has no more meaning than when applied to the telephone.