I think I should revisit the first entry under the same title as this.
Here is the deal.
Nothing much has changed.
For whatever reason, I expected a magical transcendental event to come and shake me up, but nothing of the sort ever materialized in my pixelized world. What happened in the last year in SL is pretty much the same that happened in the first few months. The friendships are there, except the RL-based ones remained, while the SL ones whittled away little by little to become but a memory, and be replaced by other willing participants. I was sorry to see Dave, my SL friend from the first posting, vanish into the SL landscape. He was so wise, so into language learning (okay, dorky things I like about SL). But we discovered our likes to be so polarized, that we could not find a middle ground on which to function. The lack of pragmatic elements, the constant reliance on written text devoid of nuances and other semiotic elements that allow us recognize meaning beyond the written word was absent.
Yes.
The real life friends have remained.
The SL ones have been found worthy substitutes. But they are not the same people, nor the same ideas, nor the same SL skills. They are simply not the same people. And the energy once dedicated to meeting and talking and dancing seems is at best diluted by past experience. At worse, it makes SL seem like a game and therefore treat everyone as a player.
What does it say about the fickleness of the whole lifestyle?
My SL friend DT insists on 'insubstantiality' to life and living in SL. How depressing, I thought. I disagreed, initially for selfish reasons, thinking of myself as quite substantial in my own world, to my friends, to my colleagues. So what was my friend talking about? Himself, perhaps? Of course, I was basing my opinion on my own RL experience where my friendships once established tend to never evaporate into pixels and beyond. The same rules cannot be applied to virtual environments where people may just disappear from one day to the next. I assured my friend that save for an unexpected RL passing, I would not disappear from the virtual landscape where we have come to form a friendship. In the unfortunate event that this would transpire, my friend Zola (from RL) would be the person to notify my SL friends. It all seems very clear to me. Not too convincing to my SL friend and he's not one to change his view anytime soon.
So what is the big hoopla everyone talks about? The extension of reality into virtual worlds? Sure, there is the element of being able to talk and share and hope together for a better RL/SL. But how long does that last? And is it really worth the time given the constraints/limitations of a virtual world? For some it is. But being that I have a full RL to which I give precedence over any virtual one simply makes immersion into avatar form a very difficult process. I have found that while SL retains its virtual charms, I cannot retain my virtual friendships for the erratic time schedules under which I enter. Hence, the lack of constancy or routine has proven to be the biggest obstacle to the development of meaningful relationships based on talk/IM alone. The hoopla is not meant to be enjoyed by people like me.
Then something happened. I entered a community of practice based on SL photography, but one developed online outside of the synchronous communication expected inworld. In the last year I have learned the ways of Photoshop (digital manipulation) and gained membership in several social networks through Flickr (photography hosting website). I have yet to solidify any of the commenters on my photostream as friends, but I have been lucky enough to meet a few inworld, and that has in turn re-energized my reason for having a footprint in a virtual environment. The main difference is that in this network we all share something very important in common: we love photography and use digital manipulation to express ourselves beyond the limits of what any virtual environment could allow.
So what have I done in the last year?
Well, I have IMed, used voiced, hunted for freebies, become a photographer, played with Windlights, learned to use megaprims, established a footprint gallery, albeit a tiny one, in the hallway of a building in Avalon Town, and gained permanent permissions for my own building platform over a university I helped build. I cannot complain. But I wish I could still go back to my early friends as I used to, but some are no longer in SL, some have different hours than me, some simply need to not be found. But oddly enough, when I run through my inventory, and see the buildings we worked on together, the hilarious chats we had, the bad pictures we took and how noobish we were then, I miss them as if they had been real all along. I do. And I have discovered one more thing about myself, my selective mind really doesn't care whether these friends were RL or SL when it comes to storing their memories. So much for insubstantial...
