Exhibit 1: two pictures of the same individual.

 

One is the real man, and the other is called John Lester, who I had the privilege to speak with today. John is Director of Linden Lab’s operations in Boston, USA; Linden Labs are responsible for the leading 3D virtual world called Second Life which you have no doubt read about, here and elsewhere. You may well be one of its 3,000,000 residents.

 

John’s background is in biology and pedagogy, which meant another fantastic conversation -- this time over video, which was where I captured the image on the right. We spoke at great length about culture, biology, semiotics. And naked people.

 

Anyway. Semiotics. Symbols. Signs.

 

During a little wander in Second Life, John bumped into me -- “Sorry!” said (real) John unconsciously. The symbol (his avatar) had in some sense become real in a social sense ... that bump mattered. The pretend 3D world made from primitive polygons on my screen had become a window into (at some level) something truly social.

 

John puts it down to biology: the fact that at some point certain aspects of any virtual community cease to be symbolic / representational and we decide they’re as much like the real thing as to be indistinguishable. He says our evolutionary success was predicated in part on society, interrelations, and social navigation of 3D space using symbolic language, all wrangled by our brain. Our biology.

 

Not to get all French on you here, but any good semiotician would tell you any sentence we utter contains a similar trick to Second Life’s sudden transparency. We weren’t born with vocabulary and we weren’t born with symbolic understanding of social intercourse. Language is consensus; use it enough and you stop hearing symbol-for-tall-wood-thing and start to see “tree” or “funny looking elf.” In this sense, Second Life and other virtual communities are no more then a new form of consensus language ... our brain eventually filling in the gaps, persuading us that we really truly understand each other. Look, it makes sense to me at the end of a long day.

 

Michel Houellebecq you should have done the interview son.

 

One thing about living your life mediated by internet protocol is that you spend a lot of time looking at a screen. I have a headache.