the digital divide and information technology // cultural clashes, the ideology of linden lab, and consumer culture // a return to orientalism
In 1977, Edward Said unleashed his seminal work, Orientalism, into an academic world that was unprepared for theories of such magnitude, depth, and provocation. In Orientalism, Said claimed an unexamined and unrecognized prejudice on behalf of Western scholars and elites towards cultures of the Middle East and the Asian continent as a whole, over-generalized at the time as 'The Orient'. To Said, Orientalism represented a "distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts" that painted a distinct difference between "us" (Said's Occident) and "them" (the Orient) . Said accused Western scholars, and Western culture as a whole, of reductionalism:
"So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression."
The reaction to Said's central thesis was, as expected, varied. Ranging from unwavering praise to the harshest of criticisms, Said sparked a new discourse in the study of global issues based around an awareness of post-colonial elitism and the prevalence of cultural imperialism. The entire discipline of global issues was based on regimes, and even though resisted by many initially, post-colonial studies is now a major tenant of any academic study of global politics. Tickner expands upon this central notion, claiming "national identities, constructed in terms of differentiation from devalued others both inside and outside state boundaries, reinforce social and cultural hierarchies and provide the legitimization for expansionary projects, military preparedness, and ever war".
Such a framework is stimulating in reference to the backlash discussed earlier against Second Life in the mainstream press. In the same article where Shirky chastises the numbers surrounding Second Life's population - as noted previously a fair, if not misguided, critique - Shirky similarly lambasts the reporters who to that point, seemingly gave Second Life an "easy time":
"What accounts for the current press interest in Second Life? [...] First, the tech beat is an intake valve for the young. Most reporters don't remember that anyone has ever wrongly predicted a bright future for immersive worlds or flythrough 3D spaces in the past, so they have no skepticism triggered by the historical failure of things like LambdaMOO or VRML. Instead, they hear of a marvelous thing - A virtual world! Where you have an avatar that travels around! And talks to other avatars! - which they then see with their very own eyes. How cool is that? You'd have to be a pretty crotchety old skeptic not to want to believe. I bet few of those reporters ever go back, but I'm sure they're sure that other people do (something we know to be false, to a first approximation, from the aforementioned churn.) Second Life is a story that's too good to check."
Shirky fairly obviously calls into question the journalistic rigor, and thus integrity, of those who were covering Second Life. In questioning one of the most revered bastions of contemporary journalism - one needs to only look torwards the glorified figure of Edward R. Murrow in contemporary society to notice this trend - Shirky put an entire community on the defensive. Rather than approach further explanations of Second Life in a way that was more balanced, journalists as a whole allowed the pendulum to swing the other way, criticizing Second Life with the same intense vigor they praised it with.
This is not to imply that criticism is not due for Second Life or other virtual worlds, but rather to begin an analysis of what increasingly is manifested as bigotry and net-xenophobia. A particularly close-minded narrative was presented in the October 2007 issue of GOOD Magazine, titled Get A Life. The author, Morgan Clendaniel, lands in Second Life with the "noble" intention to explore a space where he "will no longer be hindered by the chafing constraints of our physical world", yet the article goes onto censure Second Life for its ability to function, in Clendaniel's mind, only as a place for sex and failed experiments in new business . Clendaniel claims Second Life "appears to be less a new way for businesses to reach their consumers, and more of a way for people with a little skill at using Second Life's programming code to make a few quick bucks in the cock market", a reference to his struggle to find a virtual penis. To Clendaniel, "virtual sex is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a virtual world." Clendaniel then lambastes Second Life's failures to captivate bug business, stating that corporations are "eating the losses of paying designers to create lavish headquarters for them, and leaving altogether." Finally, Clendaniel observes that while a million users have logged on in the week prior to his visit, 8 million have chosen not to. These are the tropes of Second Life Orientalism - sex, anti-capitalism, and the myth of empty spaces.
While Clendaniel's observation that Second Life allows Residents to "live out a fantasy that is totally unfeasible in the real world" is in line with our discussion of multiplicity of self, it is steeped in loaded language . By referring to the metaverse as a "fanasy", Clendaniel portrays it is as childish and a mode for escapism rather than an extension of a person's social life . Clendaniel isn't the only person participating in this sort of rhetoric - the Telecommunications Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives recently held a hearing on virtual worlds in which most of the dialogue made light of the elected officials' avatars, condescending in language that was only equaled by a subsequent related article in the Washington Post. In this write up, Dana Milbank writes, among other imperialist rhetoric, that hearing took place in "unwitting observance of April Fools' Day."
While this rhetoric seems harmless in nature, it invokes serious questioning when the words avatar and Second Life are replaced with marginalized persons and developing nations. If Clendaniel was to write so sardonically about any area in the majority world, he would be rightfully chastised by progressives, moderates, and conservatives alike as a racist or imperialist. As pointed out in the comments section on GOOD's website, Clendaniel doesn't belong to any Second Life groups - the major social structure in Second Life - and spent limited time the metaverse. Yet he felt he understood the nuances and complexities of the space well enough to write an article laced with rash judgments and generalizations. It is easy to forget that there are real people, often socially marginalized in their physical lives, behind avatars, and to them, Second Life isn't a bizarre coagulation of "Otherness" or a spectacle, but a very integral part of their universe.
Thankfully, the current academic landscape for analyzing and understanding virtual worlds is not nearly as bleak as the environment Said encountered in his research for Oritentalism. On a very basic level, this is due to a few prominent individuals - Henry Jenkins and Joi Ito come immediately to mind - who are able to reach mass audiences through the internet and defend the lifestyles and culture that exist in Second Life and in virtual communities. The "other", in this 'net-orientalism', has a prominent voice, a major distinction between the ill encountered by Said.
At the end of his novel Culture and Imperialism, Said takes the following stance:
"No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental."
Said was concerned with, amongst a bevy of other inquires, what "intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly, and cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist tradition like Orientalism." Guiding Said's work was an assumption that Orientalism was fueled in large part by a "fairly constant sense of confrontation felt be Westerners in dealing with the East" . Said further claims that "human societies [...] have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with "other" cultures."
Citizens of Second Life are a new "other" - a group that can't be understood from the outside, and thus are categorized outwardly with sweeping generalizations that often imply negative creations of self. Their culture is inherently odd to those who don't experience it first hand, as it apes many traditions found in first life while subverting these practices subtly as a means to adapt to the nature of metaverses. Similarly, Second Life allows greater refuge for cultural sub-groupings who are already marginalized by mainstream society, making any backlash against it as an online society easier. This isn't much different from how the general public perceived the early Internet - a gateway for pornography, gambling, and other indulgences that we were too fearful to explore in meatspace. Perhaps this has to do with the linguistic associations of "Second Life" - many react to such a phrase in a way that implies it is a replacement or substitute for their day-to-day interactions as opposed to something that is complimentary. Taking this argument a step further, we may in the future be unable to distinguish our 'second' lives from our 'fist' lives. Just as social networking has become a natural extension of traditional social interactions, so too may Second Life, or more realistically a currently unforeseen metaverse (or metaverses) become natural extensions of how we interact with one another as opposed to contentious societies that face harsh judgments from an insecure populous.