Colin Marchon, who currently attends Tisch School of the Arts at New York University for Film and Television Production, has produced an excellent documentary series : Our Technological Identity Crises. The series consists of three short, but very powerful videos :
The videos are short, each one coming in at around five minutes and they are all absolutely fascinating to me. As this blog is largely about virtual worlds I’m going to concentrate on Part 2, but all three are relevant. Part 2 is a good pick though because it has a brief discussion about Second Life as well as aspects that are dear to Second Life users and beyond, terms of service and identity.
The video opens with Federico Pistono, author of Robots Will Steal Your Job But That’s Ok. Federico has a view on life that some will feel is a bit too extreme, he sees his time away from the keyboard not as being in real life, but as being AFK. This is an interesting thought but I find it a tad too technologically based to embrace it myself.
Then the video moves on to augmented reality and an important question arises, if digital representations are going to surround us in the future, what makes the world inside our computers and phones any less real than the physical world? The point here being, I think, that augmented reality will contain digital representations that will be considered more real than the worlds inside computers.
Francesca Ferrando, philosopher of the posthuman, adjunct at faculty at NYU then adds her thoughts. Francesca talks of how we can connect with millions of other people with a body of your own imagination. The body of your own imagination that Francesca is talking about is your avatar. There have been many discussions about how avatars are in many cases an extension of ourselves. Francesca then makes an interesting comment about Second Life :
I’m telling you the truth, the first time my avatar flew in Second Life, I had chills in my physical body.
An interesting perspective. The flight thing is interesting, I was never bowled over by flight in Second Life, but then again I had played games like City Of Heroes before I arrived. On the other hand, when Gene Roddenberry Junior visited Second Life, he was very impressed by the fact that his avatar could fly.
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