David Payne on Second Life
13 Oct, 08 | by BMJ Group
There’s a great scene in US sitcom Cheers when postal worker Cliff Clavin confidently predicts that email is a passing fad and the art of letter-writing will one day return.
Cliff is threatened by technology, fears for his livelihood, and, besides, has no need of email. His world is small. All his social interaction happens in a Boston bar where everybody knows his name, surrounded by Sam, Carla, Diane, Frasier, and, most importantly, Norm Peterson, his best buddy.
But technology can bring out the Cliff in all of us, as it did to me last week at Nature Magazine’s trendy London HQ, when its Second Life presence Elucian Islands was unveiled to an audience of scientists, journalists, and academics.
Like a tourist film for a Dubai golf resort, the launch video whizzed us through the islands’ main plaza, science park, and conference centre, while a community of seated avatars (with names like Troy and Joanna Wombat), asked how we First Lifers were reacting to their presence.
Seated three rows back, I was desperate to view these people at closer range, to read the on-screen tags above their heads. Who were they? Were they really, as Second Life’s homepage claims, pioneers in a virtual world imagined and created by themselves?
Who were their First Life counterparts, and why were they not outside, enjoying the “real world” late autumn sun as it beat down over the canal outside?
This was my first proper encounter with Second Life’s 3D world since reading John Stott’s BMJ feature last year about how the technology is increasingly being applied in universities.
Anthony Steed, a Reader in Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics at University College London, told Elucian Islands launch event that he hopes to hold his first international conference programme committee in Second Life.
Already avatars have been used by psychologists to help tackle people with social phobias, he added.
Former newspaper proprietor Eddy Shah, who is soon to publish a cyber world thriller called Second World, talked of Second Life technology enabling instantaneous translation in the future, making language barriers a thing of the past.
“All scientists do is get something going. People move it forward,” he said.
In the 1980s Shah challenged his two children, then aged 6 and 8, to produce a newspaper in three days using an Apple computer. They managed it easily, paving the way for the desktop publishing revolution he pioneered and his defeat of the print unions.
I’d witnessed this first revolution first hand, and in the Nature building.
Macmillan Publishing, where I worked in the early 1990s, was a late adopter of the new technology, finally moving from typewriters to computers in 1994. It was in that building that I’d sent my first email and surfed my first website.
But back to Second Lifers. What next for them? Shah predicts future avatars will at some stage experience touch, taste, joy, pain, sorry, anger, frustration. The same as us, in other words.
The same as Cliff, in fact, when he masked his fear and uncertainty by pompously confining email to an early grave all those years ago.
David Payne is bmj.com editor.
E-mail has come to stay.I hardly write any letter nowadays.
I am able to give a reply to this blog immediately after reading it.Such is the advancement.
Dr.N.P.Viswanathan
October 14th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
The idea behind “Second Life” is so appalling. It is a non- existing world, with non- existing characters and their realtionships. Isn’ t the premise of “Mental health” the fact that a person lives in the present?
What is “Second Life” in this light? Living in the future, about which we know nothing?
Ms.Vesna Dadic Zivojinovic
October 16th, 2008 at 8:55 am
I enclose a section from my new book where Conor, my hero, visits his doctor on the Web. He wears a MediJacket and plugs into the doctor who is at a computer many miles away. Their avatars actually speak to each other - as in this scene.
Regards
Eddy Shah
Rose Cottage
2M197K125RC, The Brick
SecondWorld
RealTime. Zero minus 12 hrs and 33 mins
The doctor was his usual patronising self. He sat the other side of his desk from me, the computer monitor between us. The doctor’s office was sparse; the desk and a blue filing cabinet behind him. It was only there for show, to give the office a traditional, old-fashioned look. Someone’s idea of making the patient feel at home.
‘You’re spending too much time in the Web,’ he said gruffly.
‘But I’m active in there. It’s my job.’ I hated defending myself, like an addict promising to give up a habit he couldn’t give up.
‘You need real exercise. You need to walk and work your muscles. Fresh air, that sort of old-fashioned exercise. You need to get fit.’
‘I will. But what’s wrong with me now?’
‘Nothing. Your muscles are becoming flabby. That’s why you’re straining them.’ The doctor referred to his screen. ‘Your DNA shows a potential for heart problems.’
‘I know.’
‘Rest of you is fine. At this rate, and with your DNA reading, I don’t think you’ll make eighty. That’s not old these days. Your blood pressure’s way too high. You still taking those pills for that?’
‘Yes.’
The doctor tapped his keyboard. ‘I see you get them delivered from the supermarket. You should go there instead of waiting for everything to be delivered.’
‘I do…sometimes.’
‘How’s your anger management?’
‘Okay.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘I’ve been okay.’ I hated the MediJacket. It diagnosed all faults, past and present.
‘I can give you medication for that.’
‘I don’t need it.’
‘That’s why you’ve got such high blood pressure.
‘I’ll join a Fitness Gym.’
‘Sure. In SecondWorld. They plug you in and pass electric currents through so your body jerks in RealWorld. Some exercise!’ the doctor snorted. ‘Waste of time, waste of credits. You all think you can buy into your dreams through the Web. Truth is, the technology it creates does not guarantee satisfaction.’ He looked at his ScreenRecords again. ‘You live in Norfolk. Now that’s a good place…for walking. For getting fit.’
‘I get the point, Doctor.’
‘Then do it. Live longer, Mr Smith. We’re in a world where medical techniques make people live till they’re a hundred and thirty. You’re not even fifty and you look twice your age. Get some recon surgery. Get rid of those lines on your face. More hair on your head. Dammit, you can afford it.’
‘I like the way I am.’
‘Nobody else does. That’s probably why you never got married.’
‘Hey, is that necessary?’
‘If insults get you fit, then yes. You need to get that DNA problem resolved. Nobody’ll marry you anyway, once they’ve checked your charts. And you definitely won’t get insurance for kids. Not kids with flawed hearts.’
‘I don’t want to be a perfect specimen.’
The doctor laughed. ‘That you’re not. Always reporting aches and pains. When there’s nothing wrong with you. Just get out and exercise. Don’t waste my time, or yours. Anymore. GET FIT, MR SMITH. Come back when you’ve something seriously wrong with you.’
‘That it?’
‘That’s plenty. A final word of advice, Mr Smith?’
I couldn’t wait.
‘Get a dog. One that walks you to death. It’ll be a lot cheaper than coming to me. And it won’t shout at you.’ The doctor sighed and faded away
I velcroed the MediJacket off. I hated wearing it, giving all my bodily data to an unknown doctor sitting in some office in the Sprawl, a hundred miles away.
I switched the screen off, swore and went back to RealWorld.
Eddy Shah
October 30th, 2008 at 1:46 pm