Avatar marketing, French philosophy and discussions not possible in RL
(Jacques Derrida, picture by Ben Oswest, some rights reserved)
Yay! I held my very first event in Second Life, at the Summer Fair of the Chilbo community. My event was very simple: gathering some people and musing about “how reading (or watching movies!) does inspire virtual life”. I ended up talking about French philosophers and how their often misunderstood thinking helps me understand some key issues in virtual worlds. It is almost weird to discover how texts written by those intellectuals in the previous century seem to correspond with recent marketing insights about avatar behavior.
I really liked doing this event, especially because of the very interesting backchat and discussion.
French philosophers
I tried to explain my fascination for the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) previously at a Metanomics show, but please allow me to develop this further. Derrida is known for his practice of deconstruction, which pursues the meaning of a text to the point of undoing the oppositions on which the text is apparently founded and to the point of showing that the text is irreducibly complex and stable. This helps me thinking the virtual (neither real as we know it nor unreal), the unstable opposition between presence and absence etc.
One of the big examples that Derrida gave us is that of the opposition of speech versus writing. In our Western tradition, speech is often considered as being superior because of the presence of the speaker, who can always assist her words.
It’s a bit like Socrates did when discussing on the marketplace and refusing to write down his teachings. Derrida, my favorite philosopher, showed us in exquisite detail how relative and difficult the so-called immediacy of speaking is and how the great conversations of Socrates came to us through the carefully crafted texts written by Plato.
At the same time those thinkers tell us that writing is a gift: a gift from the gods, a talent, but also a poison, which subverts the power of the speaker and leads to misinterpretations and misunderstandings. The word Gift has in various languages, such as German and Dutch, this double meaning of something which is given, a present, and of a poisonous substance.
But of course, also a speaker does not really own the words she speaks or the thoughts she produces. There is something which is called intertextuality: we somehow borrow words and concepts with long histories, and which continue a life of their own. New texts are being written or recorded, and they open up new meanings and close down other meanings and possibilities of pre-existing texts. So even when we speak, and seem to own our own words in a very real sense, we are at the same time owned by the words we use.
It is often said that Derrida is focusing to much on “text”, but in fact one has to understand that “text” is a very broad category in his thinking. “Text” has to be thought of as “texture”, “textile”, “tissue”: interconnections where changes somewhere in the texture can have an influence elsewhere because of the often very unstable connections between words, ideas, “texts” (which can also be video, audio, practices etc of course).
This is not to say that speaking and writing are the same. It is to say that it is tricky to define the differences in terms of simple oppositions. And I am really convinced that Virtual Worlds are beautiful examples of this.
During the event in Chilbo, I had to type, basically to text chat. So I was producing a text in realtime, sharing the same time and space with other avatars. I could assist my own words, even though I could not see the facial expressions of those present, I could read the backchat. At the same time I was physically far away, and my text was ready to be copied, distributed, interpreted by potentially many others, without any possibility for me to assist my words.
We were in Chilbo, as we say, in a virtual environment, which is more complicated than it seems (philosophy is the art of showing the complexity of seemingly simple situations, journalism is the art to represent complex situations in a simple way).
Virtuality is a word which has to negociate the oppostion between the real and the unreal. It is highly problematic for people in virtual worlds to speak about “real life”, and they feel that it is problematic, because they don’t dare saying “real life” anymore, they say “rl”. This is classical: as soon as words become problematic, we start abbreviating them, to evacuate the problem. The same applies for “Second Life” and all the lame jokes about “First Life”. These are all examples of thinking in terms of simple oppositions, which prevents us from thinking the real differences.
I also have to mention Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995)and Felix Guattari (1930-1992), two other French thinkers. I did read A Thousand Plateaus, where the concept rhizome seems very interesting in the context of virtual worlds, data representation etc. Wikipedia on “rhizome“:
Félix Guattari used the term “rhizome” to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. In A Thousand Plateaus, they opposed it to an arborescent conception of knowledge, which worked with dualist categories and binary choices.
Their thinking is rather different from that of Derrida, but there are common themes. The binary choices are of course what we called the simple oppositions (black and white, real and unreal, absent and present etc).
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007): my last French thinker for today) developed provocative ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. He became a thinker of simulacra and simulation, asking tough questions about reality and meaning in our societies. He analyzed the first Gulf War as a dramatic example of a war which used the words of previous world conflicts (such as the Allies) but where the conflict was being fought using images, in propaganda but also in simulations and in representations – which nowadays reminds us of mirror worlds and augmented reality.
So for Baudrillard the opposition and hierarchy between “reality” and “images/simulations” becomes a problem: the boundaries are once again deconstructed and we are no longer too sure what is real, what is an image or simulation and what is real. Of course, also simulations can easily lead us into deadly confrontations.
Identities and marketing
Now let us turn to the concept of identity. Is an avatar something like writing, compared to speech? Should the ideal avatar be transparent, so as to show us immediately the “real person” behind the avatar? Is the avatar a “Gift”, an unavoidable evil, which is needed in order to have a virtual worlds but which leads to misunderstandings and problems about identities?
Marketing people often think they should look for the real person behind the avatars. But as we all know, we avatars are at least slightly different from our so-called real life typists. Or even a lot different. This is also what frightens a lot of people and a reason while avatarization is not self-evident. Either the avatar is a 100 procent representation of the real life person, and than it is really an uncanny experience. Or the avatar is very different, swapping gender or selecting another age for instance.
Why does this frighten people? Because identities are problematic constructions, not only in virtual worlds. We all are behaving differently at work, practicing sports, in our political, philosophical or religious communities, in our families etc. There is such a thing as an identity, making me to what I am now, and you to what you are. But we cannot think about individuals as about unchanging, coherent objects.
Nothing new for psychotherapists, but avatars make this very obvious for everybody. They show us that our identities are complicated and even problematic. Some marketing people even say that we should stop looking for the “real persons” behind the avatars and instead focus on the behavior of the avatars themselves. They tell us more about the preferences and desires of people than the behavior of the carefully constructed real life identities.
This is an important business issue. In 10 years time the largest influence on all purchases will be the virtual experiences associated with them. More money will be spent marketing and selling to multiple online personae than marketing and selling offline. This will be driven by Generation Virtual or Generation V, a very different generation from the previous ones. Those bold predictions (see also a previous post) are being rmade by principal analyst Adam Sarner of Gartner in a commentary on Forbes.com.
Marketing people use categories such as baby boomers, Generation X and Generation Y to segment the population with a focus on age. However, Generation V recognizes that general behavior, attitudes and interests start to blend in an online environment:
Customers will hop across segments at various times for various reasons and are likely to act like several generations at any given time.
Unlike previous generations, Generation V is not defined by age, gender, social demographic or geography, but is based on demonstrated achievement, accomplishments (merit) and an increasing preference toward the use of digital media channels to discover information, build knowledge and share insights. Generation V members create multiple, often anonymous, personae to control relevant information flow into the community and businesses.
Nowadays companies are still obsessed by discovering the “real identities” of customers and potential customers. In the new world envisioned by Sarner, companies will have to use psychographics to understand the personae (etymologically: the masks!). Virtual environments will be created in order to get a better understanding of the reactions and behaviors of those personae.
A same logic is at work here: just as we should take writing seriously, and discover in the issues concerning writing similar issues concerning speaking, we can learn from the avatarization issues in order to understand better how to speak about human beings. Not by using simple oppositions, but almost in creating a new language, or in anyway by using existing words and concepts in a very careful way.
Backchat and discussion:
A number of interesting remarks about intertextuality, networks, interconnections. In this context there is the upcoming Connectivism course. Fleep Tuque: the course really seems to touch on some of these topics, in the context of – how we are LEARNING now is changing, based on our social connections, networked connections, virtual connections…
The concept of “connectivism” means that our learning happens through establishing connections, both biologically based in our neural networks and externally through our social networks, databases, the “net” generally.
Carolrb Roux: “I think I learn more now through Twitter and blogs than anything else”.
About avatars:
Malburns Writer: I see avatar as ultimate self-expression and in some cases probably has facats that are not possible in rl – but I also see future where the avatar of now will become a holographic projection of rl self so maybe we are simply at transient point on this.
About communication, discussion techniques in virtual worlds:
Fleep Tuque: …this duality between synchronicity and _a_synchronicity – time shifted conversations, what it means in THIS environment to not just be able to manipulate text, but manipulate _symbols_ which hold multiple meanings. (including the symbology of our avatars)
General discussion:
How is this virtual discussion space to be called? Not physical space but maybe cognitive space, where is Twitter to be situated, the fact that synchronous chat discussions have a sense of “location” (Tara Yeats) even when communication is 2D, the fact that you can have a chat with ten persons without having the cacaphony which would be the result in a phone conference (Claude Desmoulins)
Most of us are quite comfortable LISTENING to a verbal conversation while holding many simultaneous ones in text. For a newcomer, we all appear to be lunatics.(Fleep Tuque)
Some Harvard folks were experimenting with a wall display that simulated backchat, I think (Chimera Cosmos)
And of course… Snow Crash:
Fleep Tuque: To get back to the literarcy component of this, something that I am surprised to not see discussed very much considering its connection to Second Life is the concept in Stephenson’s Snow Crash about the “wetware” in our heads, and how these experience, virtual experiences, may be truly effecting the neural paths in our brains. One of these days I want to have a conversation about that. 
Roland Legrand
