I was originally going to post something a bit more upbeat/funny today, but last night a weird sort of "tragedy" occurred. One of my first "friends" from Flickr.com committed virtual suicide, removing his photostream and taking off his profile, thus removing himself from the 'Stream. He also removed his Facebook profile, (which though I understand the desire to do so,) both shocked and saddened me. In the hours since, he decided to leave his photostream, so atleast people can still look at his awesome LEGO creations, but the whole effect is definitely jarring. Even more so, being that he manifested to return his images to the 'Stream, but ceased to be an active participant.
Whatever the reasons in real life that compelled him to do so, I hope he is well and that perhaps I'll see him be active again.
Recently I read about companies that are starting up that notify online friends when someone dies in real life. In the event of a sudden death, it's fair to assume that people may be left in the dark regarding their online friend's situation.
I guess in the case of our society, where online culture is grown beyond infancy to a point where people are now living part of their entire life online, this is becoming an issue. I have personally witnessed an online ""funeral", or celebration of the deceased, and I have also witnessed virtual deaths like I did last night, where someone basically erases their online existence. In my case, being part of the Flickr community, and part of a ten million+ population online gaming community, it's not unexpected for these events to occur.
A lot of the time, the avatars remain, whereas the gamer moves on, suspending their account while they do whatever else it is that they do.
I was (maybe making the mistake of) discussing this event with Mrs. Panic, who is outwardly disturbed by the idea of an online community, (despite the fact that her husband has been participating in such communities for four+ years now). She was so disturbed by the idea of people capitalizing on real life death in the online gaming world, that she had to walk away saying "Lalalala I can't hear you It's a game! I hate this crap! It's all beeps and whistles to me!" While I thought her reaction charming in its Luddite fervor, I had to note the gravity of the weirdness. My dad is terrified of the culture of technology becoming so out of touch with real life society (or as China Mieville refers to it; "The Quick"), that trends such as the online death notification companies are just the tip of the iceberg. I myself am fascinated by the whole culture on online-ness. I love watching documentaries about chinese gold farms, and reading articles about advances in law due to events in the gaming community. I haven't done all that much online living myself, but what I have experienced has definitely been life changing, and has made me aware of some parts of my personality I wasn't too excited to discover. For instance, I do subscribe to the concept of online addiction, and can claim to have been addicted to a game. Game culture has also changed my personality in several small but noticeable ways, such as speech patterns and levels of attention and patience.
I don't really know why it is I'm bringing this up with you all here at POT. Your thoughts/opinions, I guess. I know that for some of us here (me, Fugu, Litcube?, ) Online personas are more than just our Pieces of Thingscodenames, and taken somewhat seriously, but I'd be interested to know what others think about this? I know Mister Pony treats his online persona as something of a character in and of itself. that is interesting to me, as while my experience was not quite as disconnected, I often wished it could have been.
I'd like to see what you all think about the idea of online persona, and its ramifications in the "real world". There's either a lot here to discuss, or possibly nothing. I throw myself at the mercy of the court.
33 comments:
I think the online persona would be a difficult thing to cultivate over the course of 4 years as purely a disconnected character. Perhaps Mr. Pony has succeeded in that, but I’d like to think that Mr. Pony’s character isn’t purely fabricated, but a projection of himself onto this media. Then again, I totally don’t know Mr. Pony. I have never met Mr. Pony! I have talked with Mr. Pony, though, outside websites. He seems much like his character.
I guess when i speak of the Mr. Pony character, I am referring to the robot.
I have met Mr. Pony and though he is certainly representitive of top-of-the-line late 20th century androidics, his impressive personality algorithms are increasingly incompatible with newer software. Many of his components are no longer manufactured and have to be hand-built by shy bearded men.
Douglas Adams said it pretty well--"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things." So now there's online communities that happen to include companies providing a service by notifying your friends and loved ones that you've passed on. So what. The internet doesn't have a monopoly on businesses making money in fucked up ways, and this is a genuinely great idea.
Anyway, I can pretty much echo what Panic said about his experiences with online games. I can also say I was an addict, learned a bit about myself, it shaped the way I interact in groups... There's definitely some good that came from it but the down side is probably the 500% potential productivity loss in the US due to the 11 million people who dick around in Azeroth instead of doing something productive, so I'm pretty glad I'm out, all the same.
I don't think Pony is actually disconnected from his character as he'd like to say. He totally acts like a robot in real life. And I dunno if anyone else played that Black and White game--where you can choose to be a benevolent god or a complete ass--as hard as I tried I could never get myself to play chaotic evil and just set people on fire for fun. Similarly, I always /cried when Panic killed innocent bunnies in WoW just for the attention. Jerk.
...You know, they should have you take a myers briggs test before these games, then force you to play the opposite of what you really are. For growth purposes, you see.
I would be an ESFJ football coach.
It's weird because I always tell people when I first meet them that I am inherently evil.
You know that test told me I'd either be a forest ranger, or a fine arts photographer.
That's kind of as close to the Druid class as you can get.
That Douglas Adams quote is frighteningly accurate.
I do think it's a good idea to set up services to notify your online companions of your living status, but I don't think you should have to pay for it. i think it should be set up within the systems you are interacting with. It would make the game or network all the more immersive.
"Hi, I'm Panic! I am inherently evil. What's your name?"
Which kind of evil, though? I think there's a very fine line between lawful evil and lawful good.
...Is there a game centered around being lawful evil? I'm thinking like having to make the hard decisions for the greater good, say, kind of along the lines of a movie based on a comic that recently came out.
I thought Dungeon keeper was a game about being evil/ I never played it so I don't know.
Honestly, Though I'd like to call myself chaotic evil, I'm really more chaotic neutral. I guess I like to give fair warning. does that make me good? Oh shit.
Giving fair warning would definitely imply a "lawful" bend to your alignment. I'd challenge anyone out there who really thinks they're evil to prove it. But not really! I am just kidding! At least, I'd like to believe that there isn't evil out there.
I can't even play an evil character in an PC RPG, because it makes me feel unclean. All my partys are made up of LG or NG. I am a nerd.
In Dungeon Keeper, you play as an evil dude, but in gameplay, you're actually not doing anything evil. As you progress, and fight the "enemy", which in this case happens to be a party of good dudes (paladins, wizards, etc.), it is merely implied that you are evil. Evil in this context is only a label. For example, if you were to swap roles, and the game's story line made you a paladin, and evil warlocks were invading your dungeon, would that change the acts you were committing? Defending yourself from intruders? Not really.
Postal is probably the most inherently evil game out there.
I understand Galspanic's dad's and Mrs. Panic's distate for the online funeral business, but I also wonder whether these companies are any different from mortuaries in the real world. Most families are unable to, or unwilling to, handle many of the issues relating to a loved one's death. So they hire someone to help them. I don't think it's such a big deal if that's done online or in the real world. I agree with Douglas Adams, that people's acceptance of technological and cultural changes has a lot to do with what they've grown up with.
I think online life only gets dangerous when you lose perspective of what's real. It's obviously not healthy for people to place more importance on online relationships than the ones they have with people they live with and meet and talk to in person. Maybe that's where the line should be drawn.
Coincidentally, I came across this article/discussion that touches upon many of these issues. It takes a look at an extreme phenomenon - ordinary women who expose their bodies online - but it addresses some of general issues of spending a lot of time on the Internet, online personas, and playing roles.
(Btw, I haven't noticed Mr. Pony playing any roles different from his real life persona - at least not on Pieces of Things. Are there multiple Mr. Ponies out there? WHO ARE YOU Mr. Pony?)
This is likely the patron speaking, but... There's one part in the article where they talk about how far they're willing to expose themselves on the internet, and I think their moral and cultural motivations really just won't matter much in a few years because that anonymity will be lost. I bet that our online personas will be easily tracked back to our real identities in the near future should anyone care to do so (Our internet habits are about as unique as fingerprints), and more to the point for those people visually exposing themselves--it's already technologically possible to match a face out there with other photos, so anyone who's happened to get a snapshot of themselves no matter how innocently or "empowering" with girls gone wild (a whole issue in itself, I think) or via some web-cam==>looking up a high school photo will soon spit out a dozen links saying "could this photo of a person drunk on a bed in their own pee next to some random guy also be your old high school girlfriend?" Our future is written in our pasts, friends.
Peter Gabriel has this song called here comes the flood--not the biblical one, but the idea that one day we all wake up and can psychically read each others minds, including all our deepest darkest thoughts... and what kind of person can survive such a thing, without being able to have any secrets? Anyway, I think the internet hints at that, sometimes.
I've been feeling lately, what with facebook and twitter that we are seeing a hive mind in its infancy. i don't know if it's theHive Mind, but perhaps either the beginnings of one, or of a hive mind colony. Telling people your current status in two sentences or less is not unlike doing a pheromone dance in my eyes.
We're not quite at the Peter Gabriel level, but in certain ways we definitely are close.
Creepier still that Fugu would find resonance in Peter Gabriel.
Both the hive mind Panic described and the melding of online and offline personas forecast by Fugu sound very likely.
The hive mind is perhaps more disturbing because a great number of people tweet things like "I'm buying a milkshake" and "I'm mowing the lawn."
I don't want to be part of that hive, but if it's in its infancy like Panic says, I suppose already am. Kyyaaaaaaa
I suspect the secret online strippers will find the melding of online/offline personalities alarming. Somehow I doubt most of them have thought of that possibility.
Wow, great thread, folks. Wish I'd had time to respond in real time. If I may address points point-at-a-time:
1. I love Litcube's phrasing: "...Mr. Pony’s character isn’t purely fabricated, but a projection of himself onto this media." I think this can be said of many online personae--our avatars are idealized versions of ourselves, free of the notion that we are made of meat. When we are paying attention, we can be, online, who we know we ought to be, not counting any responsibility we may have, any prejudices we may suffer, any injury we may bear. When we are not paying attention, we comment on YouTube videos, apparently.
2. I'm sorry, that robot was never supposed to be "Mr. Pony". It's just a picture he drew. I'll change that as soon as I can.
3. The Adams quote is indeed right on. I wish he had lived longer to say more things.
4. Last I took the Myers-Briggs test, I was an ENTJ, which explains why I'm so fucking obnoxious. I'm sorry, everyone.
5. The scariest alignment is Lawful Neutral. I mean, what the fuck?
6. There is no evil. I will say (and explain) "Dirty Sanchez" to my sons before I'll start using the word "evil" around them. Behind "evil", it's all about your goals, and how they conflict with the goals of others. They will, and they do. Work it out. The word "evil" is pure propaganda, to sway a third party. I am again with Litcube on this.
7. I am also with Odori about the virtual funeral business. Maybe it's even more pure than the actual
funeral business. As far as what's "real", though, I think that particular judgment is separate from what's virtual and what's actual. True, Litcube and I have never met in person, but if I were to find myself in the city of Canada, and if my life were in jeopardy, I would trust him with my life instantly, and far sooner than I would trust some random person I had known in "real life" for years; say, Evan Leong, for instance.
8. Odori: Does that article not contain an assumption that one has to choose between one's online persona and their meat persona? I guess in the extreme, it's a little hard not to have your two world-lines collapse if you're showing your face and taking off your pants--but that's in the extreme. I think the article's trying to make the point that there's a larger metaphor there, which I'm not so sure about.
9. This Mr. Pony we're talking about starts here and continues here and probably, you know, apotheosizes with this series, with a horrible little denouement here. Lately I've also done some fake comic covers, but at my core, I'm a terrible person.
10. AND I agree with Fugu about anonymity being lost. I predict, however, that no one will care, on either end. The woman who is thinking about hiring you comes across a video of you in a three-way with 19-year old man and a 91-year old woman, but she's thinking about the video she accidentally uploaded to Facebook of her blowing a dog, and she says fuck it, you know PowerPoint, and that's what we need.
(My office is starting to use Twitter.)
11. And finally: I think any hive-mind effect that comes out of all this is purely temporary. Admittedly, for all it's fun and interactiness, social networking and microblogging is noise; but there IS value in crowdsourcing. Some wise guy trying to make a buck is going to successfully duplicate the algorithm that made millions of people favorite a youtube video about a cat. That's where REAL artificial intelligence will spring from. And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the real death knell for the human race--the beginnings of a self-aware internet that likes kittens and Star Trek and memes and doesn't need the human race one bit. Skynet. Goodbye.
One of the most entertaining, yet insightful (like the Discovery channel) comments I've read in a long time.
Then I shall number all of my comments from now on.
Re: "There is no evil... it's all about your goals, and how they conflict with the goals of others. They will, and they do. Work it out."
Maybe you're just not evil enough at heart, Pony. Some people continually make it their goal to prohibit others from achieving their own--the only way to work that out is to kick the other person in the neck. No third party propaganda needed, those fuckers are evil!
If you switch "goal" with "choice" and "evil" with "immoral"... The only paper I wrote in college that I still remember was throwing Kant and Sartre in a blender and saying that: if we should treat other people as an end in themselves and not a means to an end (Kant), and if what makes us human is our ability to make choices (Sartre), then the only truly immoral act is to prohibit people from making their own choices. I figure this is a pretty good axiom to live by, and may also be why I'm so fucking indecisive.
Re: no one will care about losing anonymity --> I dunno. I think you may be overestimating our need to judge others combined with our overbearing tendency towards hypocrisy. Just look how readily the curated internet is pointing it's collective finger at a girl screwing her dog on camera when we're all doing exactly the same thing. I mean, privately we're all, "jesus, that could have been me...", but publicly we're all, "suckah!".
Re: ICanHasCheezeBurger A.I. --> Holy shit. I seriously got chicken skin from that.
I've yet to come across the person that wasn't the hero of their own story.
Also, please link to the girl screwing her dog.
Re: "I've yet to come across the person that wasn't the hero of their own story."
I've got the feeling you are now blatantly lying, are blogging under the influence, or playing us with some devil's advocate/April fools banter.
Re: 1 girl 1 dog
I think half the commenters here are A.I.s.
Interesting idea to not be the hero of your own story.
Fuge, if you know someone who is not the hero of their own story please let me know who that is.
I mean other than someone with a mental disorder.
well, and me. because I'm the antihero in my own story.
because I'm chaotic neutral.
Well, not to drop too far into the realm of seriousness, but on one extreme you've got this kind of thing.
Getting sold to a rape camp or blown up by a suicide bomber is one thing, but making it illegal for certain people to marry, forbidding kids to learn about anything outside their religion in school--I'd say they pretty much never had a chance at choosing their own story, either.
mmm, I think we're hitting a semantics issue here. Perhaps "hero" is the offending word. I think what Pone refers to is the main character of the one's life story.
If it's your life, your story, no matter how grim or fucked up. Wouldn't you be the main character/hero of said story?
Oh! Totally! That was a semantics thing then.
Um, not the hero of their own story... you know to be completely honest, this guy.
Ha. Okay, I think that was a successfully executed Level 5 Meme.
And no, I totally mean hero, in the strong sense. Opponents of gay marriage aren't twirling their Snidley Whiplash mustaches and thinking, "Mooahahaha, now how can I most restrict the free choices of others?" They wake up in the morning, look themselves in the mirror, and ask themselves how they can best serve their Lord and Savior. We may look at this and assign words like "sad" or "misguided" or "evil", but we're a third party, looking in (I think our misunderstanding may lie in POV).
I agree that restricting the choices of others is a crappy thing to be doing, but what I'm saying is that I can't think of anyone who doesn't, on some level, no matter what they are actually doing, believe that they're doing the Right Thing.
I think there's people who knowingly do what they perceive to be the wrong thing in their sense of right and wrong, yet do it because they are being spiteful, greedy, or just plain dicks. I think there are people capable of doing that.
I have a feeling it probably causes a psychosomatic response in some way shape or form, until the person somehow justifies their action into being the "right thing". But I bet there's people that do the "wrong thing" knowingly. But I imagine they still see themselves as the hero of their own story.
Naw guys I'm serious! That guy isn't the hero of his own story anymore. He's completely lost control of where the hell his story is going.
BUT FUGU, your own story is the one you tell yourself; it's how you'd describe what's happening to you, and why you're doing what you're doing. It's the one thing that most people have any control over at all.
Well sure. But that's like saying Rick Astley is Rick Astley, because he's Rick Astley, Mr. Obvious. Rick Astley's got his own story to tell about how's he's in retirement right now and just bought a new blender. Maybe he TIVOs a lot of Food Network. Of course Rick is the hero of that story.
But that's not the story being written about him. This story, the one that everyone's going to remember after he's dead, is completely out of his control. It is now heroed by your internet hive mind. He could probably try and take control again, but he hasn't and most likely won't.
Biography is, to differing degrees, propaganda, though; and you don't call someone "evil" unless you're trying to quickly make a political, or more often, religious point.
What I'm saying is that I think it's more useful to see each other as people who at least think they're doing the right thing, with an overlaid pattern of goals both compatible and incompatible with our own. Because that's navigable, unlike calling someone "evil", which is usually something you do right before you blow their head off.
I totally get the point you're making about how Rick's brand has been completely wrested from him, and is now in the hands of a cloud of giggling idiots. Poor man.
Anyway, Fugu; what religious point were you trying to make?
I agree that a majority people who believe in all flavors of stuff feel that they're doing 'the right thing'. But you're always going to have those who know they aren't, but don't care. Did Tom Dashle really think he was doing the right thing with his taxes? Did Cheney really believe he had the nation's best interests in mind? Nixon? Enron execs? Jerry Falwell? Palpatine? Galactus? Darkseid? This guy? Maybe that guy.
My point not based on science: I still think it might be possible that there's a universal right/wrong, but I'm not sold on it. Either way I'm waiting to be convinced that there aren't people out there who like going to bar mitzvahs in clown suits and then just start sodomizing people left and right, even though they know it's wrong.
Well, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Especially regarding Dick Cheney and Galactus (although I bet Daschle wasn't thinking too hard about his taxes--I bet he had a tax guy).
My point is that the word "evil" implies a universal right/wrong, and moreover, it implies that the tribe/clan/university of the speaker is somehow more in tune with this universality, and therefore in a morally superior position to judge.
Not that people shouldn't judge, but claiming moral superiority along with judgement is a little bit bullyish, and a little bit lazy; but mostly contemptuous, dismissive, and counter to finding a solution to our differences. Doesn't our shared humanity deserve more than this?
(Please note that this does not mean I am against executing motherfuckers. I am all for the summary execution of motherfuckers who would block my goals. I just want to be as honest about it as I can.)
Well, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Especially regarding Dick Cheney and Galactus (although I bet Daschle wasn't thinking too hard about his taxes--I bet he had a tax guy).
My point is that the word "evil" implies a universal right/wrong, and moreover, it implies that the tribe/clan/university of the speaker is somehow more in tune with this universality, and therefore in a morally superior position to judge.
Not that people shouldn't judge, but claiming moral superiority along with judgement is a little bit bullyish, and a little bit lazy; but mostly contemptuous, dismissive, and counter to finding a solution to our differences. Doesn't our shared humanity deserve more than this?
(Please note that this does not mean I am against executing motherfuckers. I am all for the summary execution of motherfuckers who would block my goals. I just want to be as honest about it as I can.)
I have decided to change my alignment to Lawful Chaotic.
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