 |
|
|
  | |
. | |
- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is Java the answer to all our browser woes? Discuss the programming language's potential uses in Table Talk's Digital Culture area - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Floppy with your Frappuccino? Let's Get This Straight There goes the neighborhood The telephone toll Card bards - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
|
|
The unbearable realness of virtual being "My Tiny Life" is the best book yet on the meaning of online life.
"My Tiny Life," Julian Dibbell's definitive exploration of the life and times of the "virtual world" LambdaMOO, stands perched on an awkward contradiction. Quite simply, "My Tiny Life" is the best book yet written about the dynamics of online life -- in this particular case, as experienced in a MUD, a "multi-user domain" constructed out of text and code in which people can create alternative personae for themselves. And yet MUDs, despite at one time being all the rage in cyberspace, are now, practically speaking, archaic relics of the pre-Web era. Dibbell, who made a splash when he reported the story of a "virtual rape" in LambdaMOO for the Village Voice in 1993, has managed the unique feat of morphing from cutting-edge correspondent to a chronicler of bygone times -- without changing the topic. That's Internet time for you, and Dibbell, better than anyone, is aware of the incongruity -- one can only imagine the nagging, and growing, sense of potential irrelevance that must have tortured him through a lengthy writing process. In a coda to "My Tiny Life" he notes that by 1998 "the world of MUDs was looking more and more like a quaint, old-fashioned diversion," that it was "increasingly implausible" to imagine that "the future of cyberspace could be glimpsed within that world." Such a confession must have been agonizing to a writer who clearly began his book convinced he was staring directly at that future. Dibbell need be neither tortured nor agonized. In "My Tiny Life," wielding language both exquisite and insightful, Dibbell fleshes out universal aspects of online existence whose relevance will endure long after everyone has become bored with the flash and sparkle of the Web. He even manages to pull off the extraordinarily ambitious dual task of both contemplating and demonstrating how humans employ the tools of "representation" -- i.e. "writing" -- to explore their own nature and the truth inherent in the worlds they inhabit. It's a risky gambit. At first, Dibbell seems to be reaching far too high when he traces the historical antecedents of LambdaMOO all the way back to "that elusive evolutionary moment when the strictly private act of imagination blossomed into the preeminently social one of representation, and the machinery of culture was born." But he makes it work -- and nowhere more tellingly than in his observation that in these "final stages of our decades-long passage into the Information Age ... the classic liberal fire wall between word and deed is not likely to survive intact." In a virtual world where scenery is composed of text descriptions and all interactions between people are via text-based conversations, words are deeds. And as anyone knows who has spent any time in an online interactive setting populated by other people, those strings of ASCII characters tracing their way across your monitor screen can have a visceral impact. This is not a breathtakingly new observation, but rarely is it made with the personal honesty and eloquence that Dibbell brings to the table. The friendships created online, the emotional investments made -- whether in Dibbell's own LambdaMOO architectural creation, "The Garden of Forking Paths," or in his hopes for the evolution of a truly democratic online community -- ring with authenticity. And as the narrative progresses, Dibbell hammers the point home by interweaving the vagaries of his own "real life" romantic roller coaster with his "virtual reality" explorations of such seemingly exotic fare as "tinysex" and the "gender morphing" possibilities inherent in online existence. There is, he finds, no clear dividing line between what is real and what is virtual. He employs a number of techniques to demonstrate this point. First, there's the amusing literary device in which "My Tiny Life" is broken up into "real life" sections that are written as if they take place within a MUD -- so that, for example, his neighborhood in New York City's East Village is described repeatedly in typical MUD-lingo like "You are on a block of nicely spruced-up Lower East Side tenements running east to west, their heights uneven, their faces mostly brick, some painted and some not." Meanwhile, the sections that describe life in LamdaMOO are written as if occurring in an actual physical setting. Actuality, however, is hard to get a handle on. At one point, Dibbell describes with bemusement the ongoing debates within LambdaMOO concerning the varying degrees of "realness" that certain aspects of LambdaMOO life enjoyed. To be more real, presumably, was better than to be less real; but how can one thing be more real than another within the context of a virtual domain? The answer, of course, is that it's all real -- that anything we do with words online is as real as anything we do, period. Dibbell notes the potential First Amendment confusion that could stem from this quandary, although he doesn't dwell on it. Instead, he luxuriates within a multifaceted appreciation of virtual realness. If this sounds like territory that belongs most appropriately to graduate students who have read one too many works of poststructuralist theory, well, that's natural. As Dibbell notes, "here was a world, after all, in which the social construction of reality wasn't a matter merely of academic dogma but of basic physics." Dibbell confesses that his chosen compadres online tended to be the kinds of "assorted anarcho-pagans, slacker intellectuals, and queer-theorist computer programmers" who might be expected to interpret online existence through the prism of postmodern philosophy. And, on one or two occasions, Dibbell does do his reader the disservice of assuming that he or she is a bit more familiar with the likes of Foucault or Deleuze than is fair. But he doesn't make that mistake very often. Instead, he grounds all his
own philosophizing in sharp-eyed reporting of the nitty-gritty details of
what life was like in LambdaMOO -- the feuds, the fights, the class and
clique rivalries, the stabs at creating democratic forms of government and
fledgling market economies. And his own brutally honest recollection of his
personal thought processes -- his own emotional entanglement with online
life -- serves, time and again, to further underline his message: The
virtual life is all too real.
|
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.
