Indirect Manipulation

Vivian Sobchack, media theorist and film critic, once wrote that “even the most ordinary images find their value, their substance, their impetus, in the the agency and investments of our flesh.” She is speaking partly about something called decorporealization – that point in which a media object, such as a photograph, depicts a persona that is at once representative and interchangeable with our identity of self.

This comes to mind because I’ve recently investigated Google’s Lively, which falls short when compared to such virtual environments as Second Life. The arrow-key controls are counter-intuitive, for one thing, and the value proposition appears to be more about social networking than providing a fully-functional immersive experience.

Where Lively’s comparison to SL really breaks down, however, is the implementation and treatment of its avatars. With very basic movements and a low level of personalization, it’s difficult to attain the decorporealization necessary to offer that quality unique to virtual worlds: the ability to transcend the self to extraordinary contexts. Amelia Jones discusses this in a book I’m reading called Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art:

Cartesian or high-tech fantasies of transcending the body through pure thought—or, more recently, via free-floating Internet subjectivities—are extensions of this logic of the body as a kind of detachable image or sign for the self. … The best new media work can exist in a confluence of image, screen, space, sound and body. It heightens the tension between subject and object; it puts into play the new relations of signification produced by the emergence of digital representation—wherein the signifier is no longer a stable (or semi-stable) mark that refers to something in the real world and wherein what we see on the screen may have no relation to anything outside of its own constituent components.

So how can digital designers play into this increasingly fertile space and create an abundantly rich virtual experience? One might investigate the use of the avatar as therapy, as is being done in an alcohol rehab center in Atlanta. A Second Life space fully replicates the layout and appearance of the real center’s meeting rooms, and the therapists’ avatars are built to look just like them. David E. Stone, the center’s chief technology office, mentions the “online disinhibition” factor that allows people to reveal more about themselves than they would person-to-person.

But the real reason the virtual center appears to work might be due to how closely the center’s clients identify with their avatars during therapy:

“Clients may possibly objectify or distance themselves from their avatar, which in some cases might attenuate the effects of the therapy,” notes John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University in New Jersey who has studied the topic.

But in some cases an avatar might help, he notes. For instance developing an “observing ego” — the ability to look at oneself objectively and rationally — is critical to many kinds of psychotherapy. “It’s possible that interacting through an avatar might stimulate that observing ego,” he says.

As the so-called “3D Internet” continues to gain traction, it will be interesting to see how the rules of interaction in real life begin to merge into the online space. Even the Wall Street Journal is starting to pay attention.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 8:05 am and is filed under Social Technology, Technology and Culture, Virtual Worlds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.