Re: [-empyre-] Re: empyre Digest, Vol 29, Issue 12

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina <gabyvargasc@prodigy.net.mx> · Tue, 17 Apr 2007 08:57:03 -0400

Hello everyone.

Already the anthropology of Second Life is showing the great inequalities of
this new world in construction.  The fact is that linden dollars cost actual
dollars, and you have to have a state-of-the art computer to access second
life.  Anthro professors across the U.S. report that most anthro undergrads
have not heard of second life, and those who have heard of it either have
not accessed it or have only seldom accessed it.

Regarding digital art on second life, much advertisement is placed there by
the big corporations, as any of you may have noticed, but the shows of other
kinds are very expensive to set up, maybe except for music, since any
musician can attach his or her own music to the piece of land s/he owns (or
can't if, like me, doesn't own a piece of land).

Internet as a whole is freer and more accessible than second life; from my
point of view second life is a segregated, gated community, where money
talks louder than it does in the rest of the web.

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, Cornell University/ Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan

On 4/16/07 9:06 PM, "Alan Sondheim" <sondheim@panix.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> It's interesting to me that the description holds also for Second Life
> which of course is somewhere 'between' the corporate and individual - see
> http://www.libsecondlife.org/wiki/Main_Page for example. There are
> interesting issues I gather in terms of virtual height - 'above' the
> canopy of the playsapce for example. If SL fails, something will take its
> place, sooner or later fully open-source I think - the result eventually
> will be a relatively stable online 'place' for cultural etc. exploration
> (not to mention the fact that companies and universities, governments and
> criminal organizations, are already moving in to SL).
> 
> - Alan
> 
> 
> On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, empyre-request@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au wrote:
> 
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>> Today's Topics:
>> 
>>   1. Re: empyre Digest, Vol 29, Issue 9: forward from Deborah
>>      MacPherson (Christina McPhee)
>> 
>> 
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 19:47:34 -0700
>> From: Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>
>> Subject: [-empyre-] Re: empyre Digest, Vol 29, Issue 9: forward from
>> Deborah MacPherson
>> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> Cc: debmacp@gmail.com
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>> [hi list, this message bounced as it was posted in rich text format.
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>> 
>> ---------------------------
>> 
>> forward from Deborah MacPherson   debmacp@gmail.com
>> 
>> 
>> Hi Alan -
>> 
>> RE: "...the Net itself was developed as we know out of military
>> contracts; television connects to WWII radar
>> technologies, and so forth.'
>> 
>> THEN"...does all art have to reflect its political-sociological-
>> militarist-etc. origins"
>> 
>> I guess not.
>> 
>> Probably the only person fairly happy with the Internet may be Tim
>> Berners-Lee - but is it creative enough yet?
>> 
>> Even though anyone can now participate, in the words of Edward J.
>> Barkmeyer at NIST today on Ontolog Forum (http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-
>> bin/wiki.pl, more scientific/semantic approaches) ".....no one is
>> responsible for much of it, we have no civil engineering discipline,
>> we have no land use planning, we have random patchworks of streets,
>> we are carrying the water on foot in buckets from the most convenient
>> well, we have no police force and no fire brigade, we have sewage
>> problems, crime problems and frequent plagues.  Some communities
>> thrive and some die out, and we don't really understand why.  And yet
>> people keep coming here, because there is education, and jobs, and
>> entertainment, and money to be made. Ultimately, technology enabled
>> us to get control of it, and fires and plagues forced us to."
>> 
>> THANK YOU for not lurking. This bull has got to be taken by its horns
>> for a number of purposes. It is not simply for kids to communicate
>> with all their friends at once or military applications. Internet
>> communications and modern forms of public record keeping has got to
>> be made sense of - and why not now, sooner, rather than later so we
>> don't miss all the first time exchanges going on.
>> 
>> The Internet will evolve itself but we should also steer it for many
>> of the reasons stated here in Empyre digest and others.
>> 
>> Debbie MacPherson
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ------------------------------
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>> End of empyre Digest, Vol 29, Issue 12
>> **************************************
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
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