Second Life

I know everyone has written about Second Life and all of its many implications, but in an effort to do some actual media research, I've actually created an account. I spent most of the afternoon in an attempt to make myself some money from nothing. I made $20 by signing up to participate in the occasional market research group.

The weird thing about Second Life is that there are actual jobs, with actual time requirements. There's a huge market for designers and coders, both in and outside of the SL environment. There's also a huge market for pornography, stripping, and other "illicit" activities. That's right. Have your created avatar strip for video game money. In fact, because of the online nature of second life, I'd venture to say that activities that are illicit in our "First Lives" are less so in Second Life.

I spent my afternoon pulling together $20 (thanks to a survey) in Second Life and turning it into $50 in a casino. I was hit on twice ("good looking avatar"...I wish I was kidding), I danced by the money trees, and I flew around. The world is on overload, so the graphics are slooooow. I doubt I'll stick around long, but it was an interesting experiment.

This was the article that spawned my interest--suburbanalia invading virtual space. When I think of the idea of a "second life," to me it's about doing something with your life that you don't have the freedom to in your "first life." But Second Life is turning into a replica of real life, exaggeratedly normal. There are fewer inhibitions and more designers, but my experience so far is that little else is different.

EDIT: Just as I was wondering how the hell people actually created ENTIRE second lives, somebody decide it was satire time. Check it out here, and get your First Life NOW! ;)

Well that's just great

When I first created this site, I added a forum for discussion. I didn't put in any censorship parameters because at the time, it was really just limited to me, my friends, and their friends. Then I forgot about it. Apparently, it turned into a giant repository for porn links. I have removed it, since that is not at all what I'd like to be associated with. I'm also planning to change over to blog software with which I can better monitor comments so this doesn't happen again (I found out because this blog was comment-spammed this morning). So if you see a few changes in the next few weeks, that's why.

In light of all this, I'd like to ask your opinion. Is censorship always bad? I don't like the idea of censoring people from communicating, but I realize that I am limiting people to "relevant topics" by ridding my site of spamvertising content. So is it bad?

Thanks!

Not your average internet education

With Wikibooks and its peers came free, open-source education by and for the people. And now, with iTunes, comes the webcasted lecture. Prestigious universities like UC Berkeley and MIT (and previously Stanford, Oxford, and Yale with AllLearn) are offering webcasts--audio and sometimes video--of many of their courses, from physics to philosophy to art.

The way traditional "distance learning" courses for credit work is by combining readings and audio/video lectures with online communication through a chatroom or forum. Assignments are sent to the professor and assessed. Most of the courses available through Berkeley Webcasts and similar sites don't offer any meaningful interaction with the professor or other students, but some, like this environmental history course, provide all the salient details. The only difference from traditional DL courses is that you don't get your assignments graded.

It's not a free degree, but it IS free education as long as you have a computer, some kind of audio player, and speakers or headphones. This still excludes the poorest of the poor except through access via a library or other public internet location, but it's a pretty significant improvement in the quality of education you can get for free.

I'm doing PACS 164A: Introduction to Nonviolence right now. I'll tell you how it goes. In the meantime, educate yourselves.

Hawks, Doves, Jets, Sharks, what?

Lanier forwarded me a great article in Foreign Policy entitled Why Hawks Win. It deals with our psychological biases and how they feed in to our conflict resolution processes, including our inability to separate behavior and motives in others and our assumption, nonetheless, that our own motives are clearly visible:

"Imagine, for example, that you have been placed in a room and asked to watch a series of student speeches on the policies of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. You’ve been told in advance that the students were assigned the task of either attacking or supporting Chávez and had no choice in the matter. Now, suppose that you are then asked to assess the political leanings of these students. Shrewd observers, of course, would factor in the context and adjust their assessments accordingly. A student who gave an enthusiastic pro-Chávez speech was merely doing what she was told, not revealing anything about her true attitudes. In fact, many experiments suggest that people would overwhelmingly rate the pro-Chávez speakers as more leftist. Even when alerted to context that should affect their judgment, people tend to ignore it. Instead, they attribute the behavior they see to the person’s nature, character, or persistent motives. This bias is so robust and common that social psychologists have given it a lofty title: They call it the fundamental attribution error.

The effect of this failure in conflict situations can be pernicious. A policymaker or diplomat involved in a tense exchange with a foreign government is likely to observe a great deal of hostile behavior by that country’s representatives. Some of that behavior may indeed be the result of deep hostility. But some of it is simply a response to the current situation as it is perceived by the other side. What is ironic is that individuals who attribute others’ behavior to deep hostility are quite likely to explain away their own behavior as a result of being “pushed into a corner” by an adversary. The tendency of both sides of a dispute to view themselves as reacting to the other’s provocative behavior is a familiar feature of marital quarrels, and it is found as well in international conflicts. During the run-up to World War I, the leaders of every one of the nations that would soon be at war perceived themselves as significantly less hostile than their adversaries.

When I read this passage, my mind jumped to the New York subway system. More than once I've seen someone step into the subway car and block passage for anyone else, and my reaction has always been the same: what is WITH him/her? The context itself is lost. Nonetheless, on our drive back from Vermont I had an altercation with a young woman over a door. She and her children were moving very slowly through the door at an inconsistent rate. I misestimated their speed, and practically tripped over her son. The woman immediately started tearing into me, and I became angry with her, assuming she must have realized how unpredictably she and her brood were moving and thus must understand that it was irrational to think I was thoughtlessly ploughing through them. After all, he practically tripped me by stopping so suddenly. Back in the car, I started to think that something was wrong about the whole situation, and now I can locate it. I expected her to recognize something in me--good intentions--that I refused to recognize in her.

Another article, published in the New York Times in July, also refers to fundamental attribution error. We perceive our own actions as less hostile and less violent than those of others, and they view us in the same light.

So what's the evolutionary advantage, if any, to fundamental attribution error? What makes escalation appealing on the scale of millenia? Does it actually help survival? Or is it the neuroscience equivalent of an appendix?

YouTube and the Iraq War

A post in honor of Bush's plan to win in Iraq:


A veteran speaks out against the war, and the Navy takes a different approach.


No editorializing for today.

Babel babble

Over the holidays I saw "Babel," a film that's sparked a lot of critical conversation--good and bad--since its release. Dana Stevens (of Slate.com) has it on her top ten list and calls it "virtuosic," while David Denby of the New Yorker calls it "hopeless," despite "fearless [acting] performances." The film's basic theme (although the review itself is far more superlative than necessary) is best summed up, I believe, by Peter Travers of Rolling Stone:

“The Bible says God was angry when man tried to reach heaven by building a tower (later named Babel); he stopped the work by devising different languages that made understanding impossible. Babel came to mean noise and miscommunication.

Some things never change. The gifted Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and his remarkable screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga - this film completes the brilliant trilogy they began with Amores Perros and 21 Grams - have applied the concept of Babel to the way we live now, in a world threatened by terrorism and divided by language, race, money and religion.

Visually, linguistically, physically, everything in "Babel" is about miscommunication, spoiled intentions, and missing pieces. Unlike other reviewers, what struck me about "Babel" was its ultimate optimism. Despite all the noise, individuals in "Babel" form deeply affectionate bonds. After their tour group strands them in a remote Moroccan town, Richard and Susan (played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett respectively) are forced to trust their caretakers despite their differences. Understanding, Inarritu tells us, is forged not by speaking, but by listening to what is fundamentally similar underneath all our linguistic differences.

Much has been said about Rinko Kikuchi's stunning performance as Chieko, a deaf-mute Japanese youth whose mother's suicide has forced her to move in with her distant father. Much of "Babel" surrounds familial relations as a method of uniting characters in common experiences. Inarritu even alludes to economic/post-colonial divides by creating hope for the American and Japanese players while destroying the lives of Amelia (the Mexican caretaker of Richard and Susan's children) and of Yussef (the young Moroccan boy who shoots Susan) and his family. "Babel" is heavy and even burdensome, well-crafted and stunningly directed and acted, heart-wrenching and beautiful. If you don't buy that, at least believe me that it's worth seeing.