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Second lives

This week's lesson revolves around two documentaries: Second Bodies and Second Skin. These two documentaries are about people who are spending a lot of their time in virtual worlds. You can watch the documentaries online:

Some of you may have probably spent a fair bit of your time socializing in virtual environments yourselves, whether we think of playing multiplayer video games, building your own worlds in The Sims, exploring alternative identities in online chatrooms, or just being glued to Snapchat or TikTok in every spare moment.

Whatever your initial feelings about this kind of virtual "socializing," I hope you will watch both of these films carefully and with open minds.

Trigger warning: Discussion of suicide, isolation and depression

If you think that "real" experience can only be embodied and physically present, I hope you will consider the possibility that this is a short-sighted attitude. Many people thinking about identity today actually question whether physical embodiedness is a necessary condition of "authentic" selfhood, seeing personal identity as more a spiritual than a physical thing. For instance, Jessica Baldanza, writing in a 2016 issue of CRIT Paper (the only recommended reading for this week and well worth the short time it would take you to read it), urges us to reconsider this prejudice: "One could venture to say that our online self is exactly as real as our physical self, seeing as we only exist in our own state of consciousness and through the perceptions of others" (Baldanza 2016). Ironically, this article was only available in print, but I have scanned it for this class with the author's permission.

Baldanza sees our identities as in fact existing only in the psychic worlds of our inner experience and the minds of other people, not objectively in physical reality. She insists that "The belonging we feel with online peers who share commonalities in their virtual identities make for as authentic an experience and relationship as any. As the world becomes more globalized, community relies less on physical proximity as a means of congregating and more on common interests and affiliations."

Some of the people in these documentaries, as you will see, feel they have more genuine relationships with people online: people they know physically IRL (in real life) become more themselves in the free play of virtual activity, and people they have only known online in some cases seem closer to them than those who are in close physical proximity.

Can you really deny that this is the case for them? What are the arguments that they "need" to have relationships of an embodied kind with other people in order to be healthy or happy? You should certainly ask yourself about your own bias in this regard, rather than just assuming that your point of view is obvious to everyone.

On the other hand, if you have already completely embraced a virtual existence yourself, and can't think why people have problems with spending as much of your waking life as possible focused on a screen, a mouse, and a keyboard, I hope you will pay attention here to the down sides and potential pathologies of massively virtual existence.

There is nothing necessarily “real,” you will say, about our embodied selves ... But are you sure? In what way is my physical self not real, is it really not the real me? And in what ways is what I do online more "real" than what I do in my embodied activities? Is my physical-reality existence really something I can ignore or dismiss as not as real as what I do online? Which is more likely to be "fake"? Maybe that depends on the person.

I can fake some non-physical things in person almost as easily as online, pretending to be honest when I'm not, for instance (though if I am shy IRL I can probably fake confidence more easily online than "live"). It is much harder to fake your physical self than your virtual one, at least IRL.

In and environment like Second Life someone can fake their physical identity - sex, race, body type, and so forth - to a degree that would be difficult or impossible in the embodied world. Dependent on context, some might call this masquerade a form of cultural appropriation (if I chose to have a black avatar in a virtual world though I am white in real life: digital blackfishing); others would say this is an excellent way to explore and better understand and appreciate (and empathize with) someone else's social identity in the world, a creative form of play that can lead to understanding and change, and a welcome new form of fun and imaginary exploration - much more creative than watching movies or reading a book. But can we entirely leave behind the bodies we were born with and grew into and still feel our experience in virtual bodies is "real"?

As always, however, it is worth thinking hard about what we mean by "real" and what we mean by "virtual," rather than just assuming that physically embodied is real and virtually disembodied isn't. Please watch the documentaries, and think carefully about your own biases.

It really is important that you watch these films fully and attentively, and that you watch them before you start responding. The experiences and ideas in them will help inform your understanding of the next three lessons as well. Much of the rest of the course is about the potentials and perils of non-embodied, or not fully embodied, reality.

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