Coming of Age in Secondlife – Chapter 2
Sep 10th, 2008 by nmsliwa
When I think of “virtual reality” the first thing that comes to mind is a person with one of those shaded helmets on who is pretending to snowboard or visit the moon. This image is followed closely by one of a virtual world like Secondlife, where people interact through a computer medium using Avatars. These thoughts, evoked by the term virtual reality, seem fairly common and are often viewed in terms of these new technologies. However, Tom Boellstroff relates that virtuality is not a new concept. In fact, he relates, virtuality has been with the human race since the beginning. In chapter 2, Boellstroff expands on the ideas of virtual reality and examines the way in which it has penetrated our world. According to Boellstroff there are two primary historical time periods of the virtual world; the first in antiquity. Antiquity is explained by Boellstroff as dating back to drawings on the side of caves. The second historical period that Boellstroff discusses is the mid 19th century when telephones and later movies created and analyzed cyberspace.
One connection that Boellstroff made, that particularly interested me, was his link between cyberspace and the telephone. Boellstroff said that when two people spoke on a landline, the space between them that was created was in a way an early model of cyberspace. In a world where land line telephones seem outdated, it is interesting to think of them as a pioneering piece of technology that eventually manifested itself into the Secondlife world. Another point that Boellstroff made that particularly interested me was the way in which humans, particularly in the late 20th century, analyzed these cyber-spaces through what he calls cyberpunk. Boellstroff uses the movies “The Truman Show” to illustrate the ways in which reality was created for the main character and therefore took on a cyber-real feeling. Ironically, I just watched “The Truman Show” this past weekend for the first time in quite a while and made similar connections to the way in which reality is constructed.