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Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Comments:
That's hardly a fair assessment of Snow Crash. While a good portion of the novel takes place in the internet with a great VR display, the more interesting and surreal things, like, say, a floating colony of ships strung together by glossolalia-speaking 3rd-worlders, or, say, a black guy with a katana decapitating a white supremacist, all take place in the real world.
Online gaming is all well and good, and it's a social experience and all, but it's also a stigma to some people. To use anecdotal evidence, there was that girl who just stopped going to the bathroom and died at her computer. I would say that while the scientists doing these studies are a bit out of their element when approaching this phenomena as a malady in a broader sense, the gamers are always going to be too defensive and too insular. They run the internet, basically, which is more of a nation than we realize, and many of us will never defend our cause using channels and vocabulary that communicates to the proper audience (believing that the internet is sufficient in this case and naievely flaming amazon or CNN forums), and many times we refuse to see or take seriously that there is in fact a problem that needs to be dealt with in a serious manner. I wonder if this is because we're re-wiring ourselves to ignore the physical in favor of the digital, which would be hard to prove now given that this is all still very young, but presents the possibility of a greater social problem than anyone would be prepared to deal with.
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Online gaming is all well and good, and it's a social experience and all, but it's also a stigma to some people. To use anecdotal evidence, there was that girl who just stopped going to the bathroom and died at her computer. I would say that while the scientists doing these studies are a bit out of their element when approaching this phenomena as a malady in a broader sense, the gamers are always going to be too defensive and too insular. They run the internet, basically, which is more of a nation than we realize, and many of us will never defend our cause using channels and vocabulary that communicates to the proper audience (believing that the internet is sufficient in this case and naievely flaming amazon or CNN forums), and many times we refuse to see or take seriously that there is in fact a problem that needs to be dealt with in a serious manner. I wonder if this is because we're re-wiring ourselves to ignore the physical in favor of the digital, which would be hard to prove now given that this is all still very young, but presents the possibility of a greater social problem than anyone would be prepared to deal with.
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I was reading a CNN article today (http://edition.cnn.com/2008/BUSINESS/01/29/digital.addiction/index.html) about the growing trend of "online addicts."
First of all, for those not so versed to what an online addict might be, it's not really meant to describe someone who has a over-fervent love for asking the famed Jeeves of askjeeves.com inane questions. No, it refers to the real netizens, the people who live and lead lives no matter how small, within the digital domain. In today's evolved state of the internet, living a virtual life can be as complex as the imagination could possible fathom. The concern lies at what point is it unhealthy for the digital life to supercede the waking life.
The article touches on a niche that is particularly and alarmingly growing in number. This collection of people are those who play MMO's, or Massively Multiplayer Online games. Basically an MMO is a server, or a computer meant exclusively to distribute a digital world to as many people as the system can handle at one time while remaining stable. The faster the hardware, the more memory, the more cutting-edge the tech is, the more beautiful the world can be rendered, and the more occupants the world can contain at one time. Each server contains one world, and these players log on to the server to spend virtual time collect things, chatting with friends, toiling to achieve in-world goals, buying things with virtual funds, and even have virtual relationships. The beauty of the idea is that for any MMO "game," such as the exceedingly popular "World of Warcraft," each server contains it's own world which can be initially set up with a single program to be exactly the same on each server until it's occupants start to dynamically change and develop their own world, at which point it becomes uniquely theirs.
The writer of the article refers to a medical institution created explicitly to help cure and treat those struggling with this malignant online addiction, citing that this condition could be stemmed from underlying issue of anxiety, depression, or lack of self-esteem.
As a long-time gamer, I could see how this might become another sociological schema; a guided response from the non-gaming community to attempt to psychoanalyze the people they are completely or moderately unfamiliar with. Not only are the people who are futilely attempting to grasp the concept of digital-based memes or why ascii pictures are so poignant never really going to understand the beast they study, but it could be as simple as these people simply not possessing brains that have been hard-wired through their youth or developmental stages to enjoy video games or virtual worlds enough to understand why someone would choose to resort to the virtual over the physical. Something that most researchers do not take into consideration when delving into such topics is that this is still generally unexplored territory, even for those who highly vest their time and energies into it. These digital worlds are vast new terrains being explored by the newest crops of social generations, something that someone even as young as forty may not understand, because it just wasn't something that they had during their developmental years to shape them into who they were to become. This touches on the idea that no one in my generation, or even the generation prior, has ever known what it was like to live through an economical recession a la the Great Depression, even though those who grew up counting pennies and eating potatoes every day will have been wired to have that experience of living in poverty and hardship as a fundamental part of their everyday psyche.
If you think about it, almost anything on the internet available to consumers is just a large mesh of people creating and communicating. It is all inherently and intricately social. The internet has the equivalent chemical stability of nitroglycerin which allows it to evolve faster than even the most potent of superviruses (perhaps why marketing that attracts tech savvy crowds is often called "viral marketing.") Under the shroud of the digital veil that changes every time someone blinks, no one has to be who they would ultimately appear when face to face. In the virtual world one can easily be whoever they would want to be in the real world; they can hide their blemishes, create new personas, or with army of like minded people, even change the internet, which directly and immediately affects the real world.
Since these virtual worlds are based on machines which can break and get corrupted, people are forced to remained tethered to the real world to some degree, because basically put, if a server crashes, a whole world will be in turmoil. If this kind of situation happens, the real world will be the unavoidable fall back, or at least until the server goes back online. Neal Stephenson, cyberpunk author and digerati extreme, envisioned a world in his book "Snow Crash," where most activities took place in the virtual reality, with the real world taking passenger seat during the trip through life.
So basically my question is simply this: Is this online addiction something to deem a "problem" with the dedicated goal of a solution, or are these people pioneering a new way of life which will eventually become the norm?