Virtual Friends :)

PART I: This one’s for you my friends.

(Originally published in another now defunct blog...consolidation is a good thing)

There are several components to friendship in virtual environments. While it remains true that people form friendships that are bound by affective layers in SL, there are huge differences in the evolution of trust based on whether the individual participants had some previous knowledge of each other in RL, on whether their technical abilities are up to par with the demands of life inworld, and on the social/cultural capital they may be able to translate onto their life on the grid. My RL friend Zola (all SL names henceforth) and I have an almost linear development of engagement in SL (we grew to like it for similar reasons and in similar ways) as well as an equally straightforward evolution to our SL friendship. In our particular case, we share a repertoire of likes and dislikes, are technologically savvy to different degrees, have command of different language registers to utilize in different contexts, academic and otherwise, and have shared goals which include seeing ourselves as lifelong learners and scaffolding those around us to become productive residents of this virtual environment. Rather than viewing things as impossible, we approach them as challenges to be overcome, step by step, and get on with life, both RL and SL.

As inworld life would have it, in my brief stay in SL I have been fortunate to have met real men and women, in a wide variety of avatar shapes and sizes, with whom I have made acquaintances and developed friendships. As any lifelong learner will know, we learn through interaction with each other, through the socialization we receive from one another, in learning to do things by doing them, and without exception, always with the help of a more knowledgeable other who is there to scaffold our growth within this context. I have yet to meet someone who has actually accomplished anything without tutelage from some kind from a helper. One day, feeling confident enough to answer a question posed on the NCI chat line by a fellow NCI member, I responded to a building querie posed by a relatively new resident named Dave. Earlier that same day, I had been engaged in a conversation with a very wise and helpful Seshat Czeret from NCI, so herein I figured I should put to good use my belief in the circularity of life and go on to help someone else in turn. Dave replied in kind, and soon a dialogue was started, and calling cards were exchanged. Talk about serendipitous…Dave had come in to SL the same way I had, through a class, hoping to find educational implications for SL, and found himself becoming a resident through a form of participatory engagement with the community he found there. His RL professor had incorporated SL as component of the classroom, and the students’ task reverted to simply talking to people. And in talking we became friends. But here, too, is where the differences emerge when establishing a foundation for SL friendships. However much I may have learned from our conversations, I don’t know Dave like I know Zola, and every so often, assisted by a lack of verbal and visual cues readily available in RL conversations, we fell back into “distrust” mode. Why should I trust what this person is saying, why take him at his word? Well, because of that shared repertoire of things in common that has enabled me to talk to him like I talk to Zola. As one whose ontological beliefs dictate the continuation of anonymity as part and parcel of my entry into SL, I still have to wonder if friendships in the RL sense of the word can ever develop in an environment mediated by servers and the use of written chat in lieu of spoken language (no, voice is not always an option). These friendships, however, thrive under the threat that Linden Labs could potentially go down and with it take SL, as well as under the ubiquitous and quite frequent opportunities for misunderstanding.

We recently had a RL meeting in SL for our group aptly titled the SL Team. We had a visitor from a neighboring sim who has befriended us and whose work we greatly admire. But we know nothing about him other than his SL persona, and the work he has done in SL. We genuinely like him, and we even think of him as a friend. But there always remain lingering doubts, that while in RL he probably is much more than what we know him as in SL, that part which we don’t know we may not necessarily approve of. But who cares if we are to remain anonymous? I have had this conversation with my fellow SL Team members, and we agree that SL friendships carry weight in their own right. There is an emotional connection you make to fellow human beings that occurs when we are sharing ideas, ideals, goals, and visions. We reveal our inner selves as we reference our conceptualizations of what is tasteful, vulgar, ordinary, or brilliant. When we share stories and turn them into testimonials, when we explore the limits of our imaginations as we attempt to build something meaningful we reveal and transform each other…and well, how do we make our work meaningful? How do we contextualize anything without first obtaining those additional bits of information that will serve as mortar to our building blocks? What will be our background story to build upon if we don’t actively construct it with other human beings?

When I distance myself from the grid, I pretend it is all just a game of role play: go inworld, do my work, do a little exploration of the magnificent work people create there, chat a little with my buddies, attend a concert, dance a little, and return to RL unscathed, uninvolved, uninterested. However, when I find myself engaged in long conversations with some of the rather brilliant people I have met in SL, I don’t feel that way at all. This creates for a constant state of metaphysical flux, but one which fuels my creativity and makes me think of possibilities not available outside of virtual worlds. Ironically, this is a place so outside the proverbial box that we must access it through one. All I can do is laugh about it with my friends, whoever and where ever they happen to be, and see if together we can come up with ways of reconciling what we learn from each other’s shared set of tools.

See you soon….inworld! (/me winks)

Previous comments:

Teny Eurdekian // April 21, 2009 at 6:24 pm |Reply (edit)

Excellent post!

/me needs to get back to RL, outside this “box” (yet still confined)

Zola // April 23, 2009 at 12:04 pm | Reply (edit)

It is the overlap!

My vision is of two circles that overlap. Remember the three circles of Thomas Harris’s I’m okay Your Okay? Parent/child/adult overlapping and the overlap was the external perception of the person and of the person’s perception of themselves. Each circle exhibits it’s own unique characteristics coming together to make a relatively unstable –in the sense of variations in our behavior and emotions–embodiment of one whole person.

That is the way I often feel in SL. Like I am layered. Each layer reacting to the other layer. In SL I am two things. Some researchers suggest that when inhabiting a virtual environment we are inhabiting three layers of self. The physical, the virtual, and the mental perception of self.

I too, ponder the differences between SL friends I have met only on SL and those with whom I have real life relationships. My friendship with Theoretical was accelerated in the beginning by the cyber buffer of the computer interface, even though we knew we would soon meet in real life. In fact our friendship has grown more as Zola and Theoretical than their real life counterparts due to real life schedule differences. On the other hand, speaking with a friend I had met briefly on SL, but had a very long conversation with, as Theo says, it is different, but nevertheless real in its own way. A friendship in SL is centered within the context of the layers, and we initially meet but one layer of the other person in the virtual, although peeks into the mental body become more abundant if discussion continues. And within the virtual we never see through all the layers. In effect, exclusively SL friends as well as the avatar I am in SL–Zola– exist only within the confines of the pixelated universe.

Of course there is always the discussion involving how real are the personas we present in the “real world?” That is another blog for you Theo.