Creating a new mythology
“Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.” -From A Cyborg Manifesto
What are people learning when they engage in activity, interaction, and communication in Second Life? Beyond the question of whether there is a demand for learning English in SL, there is a larger question of how the tool, in this case a complex virtual world, and an understanding of a way of being within the context of the use of that tool, is an important question when we embark down this path.
What are our “historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies” when we start to engage with each other in virtual, increasingly multi-dimensional worlds? In the physical world, we have histories, individual and communal, that underlie our interactions. We have the ability to formulate abstract communications with each other, disembodied interactions, through written language. With the development of communications technologies we have been able to modify to more “bodied” exchanges, where the nuance of tone, pitch, and articulation in a voiced interaction convey more embodiment than words on a page, but less than an interaction with the whole person.
The development of information communication technology, the ability to digitize both written text and spoken information has fractured our sense of “distance” and “presence.” Whereas these were previously, at least colloquially, measures of space and time, we can be both distant and present with others across physical space and chronological time. But how is this new “enforced meaning” changing our communication? How does a shift from a visual online world (how I will loosely label our text/image-based internet) to a tactile online world (borrowing from McLuhan’s definition whereby “tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object“)?
One question in regards to teaching and learning in Second Life specifically is, how does the culture of that virtual world impacts the communicative process? Another question I would ask is how participation in a virtual world such as SL changes the participant, and is the way the participant is changed– the way they are forced to confront their identity and engage in communicative action– something that should be imposed on someone in the same manner we are all required to be participants in the physical world? What kind of disclaimer should be provided for learners who are required through coursework to join these burgeoning and wholly immersive tactile worlds?
I bring up this issue for several reasons:
1) Because much of the research and exploration of using virtual worlds such as SL for teaching and learning appears predicated on a wholly technologically deterministic approach whereby it has been created for us, so we must use it. Or from a technological utopianistic view that online we can explore these new identities in a wonderful way that doesn’t need to be critiqued. I haven’t seen a whole lot of critique of what ways of being are being introduced to students who engage in SL.
2) In the one class where the issue of SL has been brought up this semester, a student mentioned it as this “place online, where like, people live their lives and spend real money” with a tone as if to skeptically indicate that s/he had heard of this, but does such a thing really exist?
3) Capitalistic values (that whole spending real money aspect) are inherently and obviously perpetuated in the SL environment, and that may or may not be appropriate for language learning and/or other educational endeavors. Maybe, as English is the current lingua franca of business, that makes it the perfect learning environment for English.
And on that note, with #3 tying nicely back into more questions of how SL perpetuates or breaks previous historical patterns, I will break in search of lunch…
