SecondLife as PostModern
It may seem almost overly obvious to say that SecondLife is postmodern. It’s a virtual world. Enough said. Right? Well, not quite. So I’d like to explore it a bit.
What makes SecondLife postmodern? First, we should define postmodern. Through the lenses of Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida, we can define postmodernism as a theory in which multiplicity, duplicity, inconsistencies, dualities, oxymoron, and even conceptual fuzziness are not just accepted but are celebrated and explored. The postmodern seeks the ebb and flow of dichotomy in order to find the meanings that conflicting or differing ideologies produce.
So here are a few ways in which SL could be considered postmodern:
- It is both real, unreal, and something in between: Everyone accepts that a MUVE is not a physical reality. It is a theoretical “place” not a physical place. And yet, ask people who “live” in SL and they’ll tell you tales of love and death, of gain and loss, of economics, politics, and true experiences. The place may be virtual but the attachment to it, the emotional investment, is real.
- Your avatar is you, not you, and something in between: We can argue that an online version of ourselves is a more pure expression of the self, an expression of only part of the self, or another self that we can explore. The truth may lie in the intersection of these views.
- Movement is relative and static: We may feel that we fly over buildings, swim in the ocean, and lie down in a bed yet all the while what we describe is merely the processing of binary code on a server. However, at the same time, the data that makes up an agent in SL can actually physically move from one server to another server which may be in a rack across the room from the previous server.
- We are all both female and male, human and nonhuman: Avatars in SL have the ability to almost instantly become something else which means that an avatar is never totally or completely what it appears to be. Its form is only the potential it is currently displaying. We are all simultaneously what we are, what we could be, and what we have been. The only static symbol of identity is an agent’s name (see Derrida’s theory of the importance of names).
December 6th, 2006 at 1:45 am
Hello Intellagirl,
I thought also about the postmodern in relation to SL. Perhaps we could also see it as a postmodern archive…?
I am studying archiving and curating the moving image.