Danah Boyd, who does very astute work looking at the structures and practices that comprise social networking (especially on Friendster), takes issue with the supposed hype surrounding virtual worlds like Second Life. She writes:
If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it's not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don't. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don't call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.
Now Danah is a smart cookie, but her argument here reflects a theoretical proclivity that is common among social scientists (not that she is one), namely that the assumption is that the virtual connections of the digital world either replace or compliment the connections in the real world. She believes it's the latter, and takes issue with those who think the former. Neither is correct; the virtual is a supplement in the Derridean sense, in that it takes the form of an addition, but ends up reconfiguring the original to which it has been added. More on that in a second. First, let me excerpt one other portion from Danah's post:
That's the big joke about the social media explosion. 1980s and 1990s researchers argued that the Internet would make race, class, gender, etc. extinct. There was a huge assumption that geography and language would no longer matter, that social organization would be based on some higher function. Guess what? When the masses adopted social media, they replicated the same social structures present in the offline world. Hell, take a look at how people from India are organizing themselves by caste on Orkut. Nothing gets erased because it's all connected to the offline bodies that are heavily regulated on a daily basis.
Danah goes on to argue that "immersion isn't where it's at," but her arguments don't support this supposition. First, she's talking about a very specific selection of media content. While her post is primarily about Second Life, the data she collects isn't about Second Life, it's about places like MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster. This is a problem in part, if only because those other sites are actually devoted to facilitating a social network that works to enhance social networks outside of themselves. They are, in effect, giant information aggregation and dissemination devices, designed to research their users or to sell indie rock or whatever. Second Life, by contrast, purports to be something different, something immersive, something with an environment to it.
Danah deals with this concerns a bit in comments, and even backs off her original claim, arguing instead that her argument is that virtuality/immersion lacks universal appeal: "I genuinely believe these systems are great for people. But i don't believe that they are for everyone." Well yeah, no doubt, not everyone likes immersion. But I knew a lot of students who didn't like reading, and we don't mock books based on their lack of universal appeal. Still, whatever, this conversation is dealt with in her comments, so I'll leave most of it there for now.
Still, when I say she's targeting a rather small selection of media content, I actually mean that she's making the mistake of only listing systems accessible by what we think of today as "computers." She's summarily ignoring the entire modern video console market, which specializes in on-line community and immersive environments, and rarely works in order to facilitate "real world" interactions. You don't see randymasterchief_usa organizing a visit to the English poser named halo_313 for some sit-down, split-screen action. And yet both will participate in clans, leagues, and other forms of providing meaning and social interactions as they go about their random hiding and sniping. My point is certainly not that gaming consoles have more immersive games, but rather that the specific medium of the console game is more amenable to immersion as its dominant logic, whereas for most the computer remains an information processing device that enhances the flow and utilization of information for the user in a way that may or may not be immersive. Consoles work because of big screens, better sound systems (even without separate speakers and receivers, most televisions will give better sound than a home pc or a laptop), a couch, and distance between the television and the user, a distance which they must then "cross" in order to play the game, which means their involvement is far more active and engaged than is a computer user, who must adopt a certain posture, must suffer - as Danah does - possible physical problems associated with this posture, must engage an interface of keyboard and mouse, and so on and so forth. The specificity of the medium makes all the difference when it comes to understanding the appeal of cyberspace as a virtual realm predicated on immersion. Danah is right to chastise those who celebrate and hype web-based 3-d environments beyond what is reasonable, but completely wrong to think that user interest is somehow revealed, one way or the other, by current computer-based use patterns.
That's an oversight that I think plays havoc with her thesis even if we adopted her framework, but as I noted at the beginning, her theoretical frame suffers from a binary opposition between compliment/replace, which itself is indebted to an oppositional logic of real/virtual, which a number of thinkers have tried to take up and expose as problematic. In the followup post to this one, I'll explore three of those thinkers (Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Derrida) and make a case for what version of virtuality might be more profitable to add to her or anyone's theoretical understanding of the phenomenon in question.
Comments (1)
Ken, neat post. You know, I'm working on a syllabus for a class I'm tentatively calling, although I want to come up with a better name, The Rhetoric of New Media. You continue to be an inspiration on that. Thanks.
I agree with you, and I think we need to push more in that particular dichotomy she reaffirms between replacement and complementarity, and virtual/real. It strikes me that this relationship requires much more texture, and that part of the teasing out of that texture is to not make such an easy split be too firm. After all, virtuality is not about inmateriality or lack of physicality. To borrow Mark Poster's phrase, the "mode of information" ought to highlight for us the complex relationship between information, humans, and technology. For me that means the logic of organizing cultural experience (not just producing and consuming). Perhaps an extension of what Manovich once talked about as the interface (although he was talking in more technical terms).
I just finished my media class with students, and part of our conversation in the last few weeks centered on what Ned Rossiter, in a piece that is around on the web, says when he speaks about new media aesthetics: "The aesthetic dimension of new media resides in the processes, the ways of doing, the recombination of relations, the figural dismantling of action, that constitute the abstraction of the social.” We pushed that, and we spoke about what he means when he says that new media aesthetics is about the organization of sensation and perceptual regimes (which I highlight is also what the rhetorical was about). The problem with his essay is that it reads more like the "economy" of new media than the aesthetics, or even rhetoric (although he does not set out to treat that) of it. In any case, our conversation ended up being about how new media facilitates fragmentation, mode of information (which has to be teased out but I equate with connection or connectivity, and perhaps "interfacing"), articulation, and circulation (I of course duly mentioned you and a previous conversation on teaching rhet. crit that we had here) -- that is, as a cultural logic, but its power does not reside only in the technological, that is in the tech device as tool, but as toolbox (that is not even the best analogy). From the excerpts you cite of Danah, it strikes me that she is missing that perspective.
Thanks again!
Nacho
Posted by Nathaniel I. Cordova | December 22, 2006 10:52 PM
Posted on December 22, 2006 22:52