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Aug 04, 2004

Comments

1.

It's a great issue Dave and something Mikael and I gave a little consideration to in our Sopranos paper. I certainly know of numerous gaming families. In the case of EQ it is not unusual at all to find all kinds of family members playing together (nuclear, extended, split by distance etc.). I would add as well that virtual worlds in general seem very good at fostering people to experiment with what the category of family means. You have everything from people doing what I might call "soft RP" and referring to guildmembers, in-game friends, etc as fathers, mothers, daughters, etc. (and seeing non-RPers negotiate loosely RPed marriages right alongside their offline spouses is pretty interesting as well!). Sometimes this moves beyond "fiction" to people using those tags to designate meaningful relationships and connections with people they've met online. The one other interesting sideline to the family thing is the way parent-child/adult-child roles & relationships get tweaked through families playing together.

2.

Aligned to this I think is general wiredness and the cultural impacts that that has - especially for those growing up with it.

There has been much commentary about the culture of immediacy etc. Another aspect, and one more directly aligned, comes from some Forrester research I looked at a while ago about the number of IM buddies that the average tweenager had. It was over 100 I think.

The range of people that one can, in a sense, grow up with through the use of email, IM and virtual worlds is staggering, especially because it is so easy to meet people from other countries and cultures. I have no idea what this will do to family life in the future, but I’m sure it’s gonna have an impact.

3.

Excellent post -


For other parents, neo-Amish, for whom the other people in the game "aren't real," this has to be a confusing and perhaps frightening concept.

On this point, I wonder if "neo-Amish" umbrella is too large.

It seems to me one of the big social transformations in society has been towards "peer-based" stratification - High School kids hang out together in large packs etc. vs. attending more integrated (e.g. age) social events (e.g. extended family gatherings). Now marry this trend with the FOF inclinations of a wired world (including games)... now you've got kids (and folks) in packlets... groups of peers revolving around very niche tastes.

I personally don't think it will be too long now that even the most technical and culturally savy parent can wake up confused about "the space" their progeny are hanging out in.

4.

It's interesting to see how one matures with technology. I remember first discovering IM in college, and feverishly updating my away message with my plans for the afternoon. Over time I started prioritizing RL interactions higher, and wandering away in the middle of conversations.

I'm a bit more polite now, but a common theme has been using IM to maintain local and distant relationships, while being a semi-urgent medium (less so than phone, moreso than email) that's particularly good for trading information and links. It still isn't used for meeting new people, likely because I still prioritize RL interactions higher.

5.

Future Shock? That is nothing. Wait another few years for the cases of Past Shock to become common.

Ever read about the latest chip and think: "Only 3.4 Ghz?" Start opening computer papers to look for a new machine, and be suprised that nothing is much more powerful than you already have?

It's not that technology has stopped advancing (Moores law is still active), but that *meaningful* technology is slowing. Going from 100 Mhz to 200 Mhz was a bigger change than 1 Ghz to 2 Ghz in terms of perceived performance. Word has just stopped going faster :>

As we programmers work hard to port our code to 64 bit pointer platforms, it is a bit unnerving to realize that there isn't a need to ever go to 128 bit pointers.

Sorry for the bit of off-topicness. I just wanted to point out that the digerati is about to run into the same type of wall as their grandparents. Except, for them it will be the suprise when today is the *same* as yesterday.

- Brask Mumei

6.

First of all, great article Dave.

Brask Mumei wrote:It's not that technology has stopped advancing (Moores law is still active), but that *meaningful* technology is slowing. Going from 100 Mhz to 200 Mhz was a bigger change than 1 Ghz to 2 Ghz in terms of perceived performance. Word has just stopped going faster :>


I'm sure I won't be the first to bring this up, but you sound a little like the guy who proposed closing the patent office because everything meaningful had been invented (before DNA's discovery, before the integrated circuit and yes, even before Velcro). That's not to say you're wrong, as hell, I don't even know if the sun will come up tomorrow or not for sure.

But I look at how my life has changed in the last, say, 13 years (basically, since 1991 when I got hooked on text muds). The way I live now and the way I envisioned living then are so enormously different as to be a bit staggering to me. I spend most of my working day in a virtual office (we're all over the place, from San Francisco to London, and have no physical office). In fact, the virtual office we use is the operating world of Achaea, in special areas created for the administration. I mean, think about that from the perspective of the average person in 1990. "You work where? Huh? A virtual world? What? Why don't you just call each other?"

Now, granted, the Internet's massive impact is already 8-10 years old at this point, but look backwards in time a bit. How many truly large and fairly sudden changes in technology that affected the way a significant population segment lives have there been, and how often? I'd argue that before the web, it was personal computers (and I don't think those were as experience-changing as a PC). Before that, hmm. Perhaps putting men on the moon, or spaceflight generally, as it so significantly altered our scope.

Perhaps we're due for another revolution, but really, the Internet has to be one of the largest ever in terms of its impact on the western world, at least. It's not the invention of fire or language obviously, but it's hard to think of things that have had more immediate impact on the way people live, and it's only happened in the last 10 years.

Another random example might be the iPod. Total cliche of course, but the iPod has changed the way I listen to music. Those changes have not always been for the better (I experience the sometimes-drama of a full album a lot less often than I used to) but they've been dramatic in my life.

Yet another, and far more pervasive example, is the ubiquity of the cell phone. That's really only happened in the States, at least, in the last 5 years.

Anyway, I'm not sure you're wrong of course, and maybe getting older just makes me less inclined to accept technological advancement, but it doesn't -feel- like it's going any slower to me.

(Also, I have to say, saying it's unnerving to realize there's no need to ever go to 128 bit pointers is a pretty optimistic suggestion. Mankind seems genetically prone to expanding its use of resources if it can, in all areas, at all times in history.)
--matt

7.

I don't consider myself neo-Amish nor do I consider myself a luddite. As a matter of fact, I love new technology. However, when it comes to games, a leisure time activity (after all, you aren't earning money playing City of Heroes unless of course you're doing the eBay tango, but that's another discussion), I would have been telling my son to get in the dining room and eat dinner if I had been in your shoes.

It's about time management and while some people may learn it well, others will learn how to neglect previous commitments because their leaving would cause some other person playing a game to become upset. Sure, football players don't walk off the field in the middle of the game to eat dinner, but their job is to play football. I know it was not your main point, but I do believe that technology, or rather things related to technology, are more and more being used as an excuse to prioritize and shirk responsibility. Only time will tell, but just some thoughts on the matter.

8.

Matt, I think the historic events you mentioned (spaceflight, evolution of the PC, growth of the internet) are all part of a larger historical event in which massive social changes are brought about by technological advances. In spite of all the millenial angst wrought by post-9/11 terror alerts, I feel incredibly lucky to have been born into this time. We all have front row seats to what is possibly the biggest paradigm shift in history. Break out the popcorn.

Nate wrote: I personally don't think it will be too long now that even the most technical and culturally savy parent can wake up confused about "the space" their progeny are hanging out in.

Oh, I think the majority of them are already confused. Except for the rare parent like Dave who really gets it. I think Dave really hit upon the major issue that non-digerati parents have trouble grasping: the subtle shifts in meaning between what is "real" and what is "virtual" in online spaces. The Mrs. Woolleys of the world don't get that their kids are interacting with real people and, at the other end of the spectrum, there are other parents who may not understand when their kids are just engaging in a little roleplay and must be reassured that no, little Junior would never seriously want to be a violent mafioso hit man (or insert your favorite controversial roleplay example here) in RL.

Speaking of millenial paradigm shifts and digital kids (digikids?), Douglas Rushkoff writes about both of these issues quite eloquently. I'm currently reading Playing the Future: What We Can Learn From Digital Kids which was presciently written in 1996. The gist is that we adults need to look to the much savvier kids to help us navigate not just the internet but all (post)modern media.

BTW, I am deeply interested in this topic so if anyone has any other reading suggestions please toss them out here or send them to me directly.

Dave, thanks for this great post.

9.

Great post Dave -- I can't comment at length, because my in-laws are visiting. But it goes to your point that I'm reading this and I'd like to comment, doesn't it? :-)

One brief Q: how does the task force differ from the telephone, which has been a feature of teen life since the 60's and 70's. (Remember the Brady Bunch episode about the pay phone?) In other words, does the worldness of VWs introduce something special into the mix?

And final note for Betsy: Mimi Ito has some great insights just out about teen social group practices being changed by txting and the like. There's a link to it on M2M (and I think Boing Boing hit it too).

10.

Greglas,

I think the phone conversation of 1960 was just that. Its analog now is a chat session, not a task force in CoH, or a mission in SWG, or a raid in EQ.

That said, I think SOME phone conversations would fall into the same category. Examples might be giving someone directions over the phone as they're driving (which presumes today's cell phones and no laptop with Mapquest... true), walking someone through software maintenance or other task, or maybe talking to a loved one who's somewhere where contact is only occasionally possible by phone.

The difference is indeed, as Soukyan says, one of priorities. Part of the criteria for establishing priorities, however, is who and how many are depending on us to perform a task now. If it's one friend who wants to talk versus a family ritual of dinner, the former loses... unless it's the only call that friend can make or take that year.

Soukyan's disputation alse centers on an assumption it isn't clear that Dave accepts: that family dinner is a regular ritual. In some households it is and all parties know their presence is expected at a certain time. In that case a child beginning a task force or other group activity that will overlap the allotted time does need to be called to order. If there is no regular time, however, how is it fair to put the child in the position of having to choose between which set of commitments to break?

It isn't fair, but life isn't always, but part of bringing up kids is providing a good example, and one good thing to provide an example of is getting as much information as possible before making decisions. In this case that would mean understanding the realities of the commitments involved.

Would the parent drag a kid out of an overtime hockey game to make the normal dinner date at home? Might. That's a better comparison than a phone call though.

If a VW introduces something new or special to the mix it's the ignorance of parents to what's actually happening. Typically, in the past, parents knew more about everything than their kids. That is no longer a given.


11.

Part of what seems to be emerging at the opposite extreme is what marketers call "never-adopters", a sort of neo-Amish that has stopped trying to keep up. Not luddites, they have no real objection to the increasing role of technology in everyday life, they just don't understand it and don't try to adjust, picking and choosing cafeteria style. They'll take the ATM's and online banking, but not PayPal and eBay. DVD's in their SUV, but not TiVo in their living room.

Well, heck. I'd probably fit right into the "never-adopter" category. Or perhaps a better term is "reformed early adopter." After about 10 years living on the cutting edge, I've emerged on the other side profoundly skeptical of the hype and marketing speak that the digerati invoke as self-justification. As a result, I'm very careful about slapping down cash without some critical evaluation of the costs and benefits.

I agree with an earlier respondent that the pace of meaningful technology is slowing down, and this is combined with an almost pathological memory gap on the part of many digerati. Socially, I see very little in VWs now that was not happening in muds in '89. For that matter, the linguistic codes used in chat are frequently presented as a "new" phenomenon, which would be a huge shock to CB and amateur radio operators 40 years ago, and even the telegraph operators of 1889 who had their own virtual social networks. What has changed in technology is the ubiquity of certain forms of communication, not it's quality.

Just to pick two nits here, neo-Amish strikes me as a particularly bad choice of terminology here, and in this case is almost perjorative. The Amish reject modernism and contemporary technology as a result of their radical germanic-protestant ideology. "Neo-Amish" implies something that is a modification or revival of that theology, in much the same way that "neo-Paganism" claims to be a modification or revival of pre-Christian belief systems.

The "never adopters" you describe strike me as being something different. (Can a person who has a DVD in their car really be called a "never adopter"?) What you seem to be talking about is the people on the left slope of the diffusion of innovations curve who embrace a new innovation only when they see it as socially pertinent, not because Wired, Slashdot, or MIT's Technology Review says so, but because the innovation has proven its use in their day to day experience.

The second nit is that "technology" is used here in the hip buzz-word sense of the term. Hammers, saws, and horsebuggies are technology. The Amish don't reject technology so much as they reject the modernist assumption that new developments in technology are part of humanity's self-improvement project.

In a way, I think they have a point. While the shift from industrial to informational technology is a paradigm shift, I reject the claim that it is "revolutionary." 30 years into it and we are still looking at the same old conflicts being battled out using the same old tactics. If there is going to be a revolution, it will happen due to a change in ideology, or a change in ethos, not a change in technology.

Which brings me around to the answer to the question posed by this article. I don't see these issues as fundamentally different simply because we are talking about the internet. Most of my peers in the 1980s had their own little independent worlds away from their parents. I spent hours engaged in orchestra, academic decathalon, scouting, D&D and huge piles of science fiction. The key is to create some form of family space for emotional intimacy to support that independence.

12.

Matt Mihaly: "Also, I have to say, saying it's unnerving to realize there's no need to ever go to 128 bit pointers is a pretty optimistic suggestion. Mankind seems genetically prone to expanding its use of resources if it can, in all areas, at all times in history."

You are ripe to encounter past shock then. Geometric progression of *anything* is not stable. Fortunately, we are hitting psychological limits before physical ones right now. (A computer is still 2 times faster, but it doesn't feel 2 times faster.)

Pointer size is driven by addressability. How many units of memory can one address? For this to be meaningful, it is helpful to actually have that memory (whether in RAM or swapped to disk). 64 bit pointers do not give you twice the addressability of 32 bit pointers. They give you four billion times the addressability. This is 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 units of addressability. That's a pretty big number! Even if you grant that we will exceed this, what about 128 bit pointers? 256 bit pointers? With a 256 bit pointer, you could likely address every atom in the universe. There is a wall of "Enough processing power" and "Enough memory addressability". For a large portion of PC owners, we have long since passed it.

Anyways, my thesis isn't that things will stop being invented, or stop changing. It is that people who become accustomed to a high rate of change will find things not changing fast enough. This is either due to real progress slowing down, or due to the psychological reward of change falling off faster than the physical change.

So, to bring this on scope, what does this have to do with families? One thing that has not changed is people. All these supposed revolutions in industry, technology, etc, all leave us humans essentially the same. Kids have never respected their elders. Kids have always thought they were smarter. Indeed, kids always *have* been smarter than their parents. As we age, we become stupider. The only hope is one picks up that thing called "wisdom" which offsets the effects of thinking slower and less creatively.

The CoH vs Dinner is an interesting question. It, like any interesting question, has a bunch of simple and obvious solutions that are wrong :> Dinner shouldn't force kids out of an overtime hockey game. But, kids shouldn't start a hockey game just before dinner :>

I think if the family has an important event planned (including nightly dinners), it behooves the members of that family to not commit to obligations which prevent them from attending. This goes the other way around, of course. If one has an important guild meeting on Tuesday, the family shouldn't book a trip to the aquarium on that day. I think too often the parents will overrule the child's appointments (whether meeting friends in real life or in games) and wonder why the child doesn't respect their own appointments :>

- Brask Mumei

13.

I guess I'm one of the crowd asking, "How is this really different from the alienation every generation experiences from its ancestors?"

I'm just not sure that the particular technology that divides any two modern generations is really so different from that separating the understandings of past generations -- to me, the differences in human nature between individuals far outweigh any techology issues.

A parent who's described by David Keirsey as having the "Guardian" temperament (which a plurality of people have, so a lot of parents are Guardians) will typically not understand a child of any of the other three temperaments (Idealist, Rational, Artisan) no matter what. Who is more comfortable with technology generally or online gaming specifically is irrelevant next to differences in temperament among individuals.

Whether the apparent acceleration of technology change is equally irrelevant... that, I just don't know. Maybe historians of A.D. 2200 will be able to answer that question.

...

On a slightly different tack: it's not clear that advanced communication technology is an unalloyed negative or positive to those societies that adopt it.

One of the effects decried by observers of the death of marriage in Western culture from the late '60s onward was that when grandparents and parents and children were split, traditions became inaccessible to the people who most needed them. Intergenerational communication -- which is the crucial means by which cultural mechanisms that work are transmitted across time -- was severely damaged.

Then came the Internet. And as the percentage of the living population comfortable with email and IM and online games and other forms of online communication increases, it seems to me that we clever humans have -- because we needed it -- invented a new channel for connections between generations. It doesn't have the immediacy of Grandma swatting you for sassing your parents, but it's certainly better than no communication at all.

The gloomy predictions of the eternal Malthusians that Westerners were doomed to increasingly isolated and lonely lives appear once again to have been foiled by Western optimism, energy, and creativity.

Julian Simon was right: Human ingenuity really is the Ultimate Resource. If we in the West have a cultural problem, we'll solve it... or we'll go the way of Rome, and someone else will solve it for themselves. Either way, we adapt as a species.

Wow. I'm an optimist. :-)

14.


Flatfingers> I’m just not sure that the particular technology that divides any two modern generations is really so different from that separating the understandings of past generations -- to me, the differences in human nature between individuals far outweigh any technology issues. <

I’d sincerely hope there is an intergenerational shift going on. Because without it, I think we are all doomed. In the last couple of hundred years, we have moved from a set a small independent groups to pretty much one worldwide civilization. Most of our traditional behaviours are tuned to “local counts, distant doesn’t”, and “direct effects rule”. As I see it, this is quite out of step with the world we have created. In the modern world, small statistical, probabilistic effects that used to be damped by the environment build to a level where they become major forces. Our brains don’t handle this kind of cumulative threat very well without technological assistance. So I hope the coming generation is adept at using computer technology, if only to deal with the new world our technology has created.

I think there is a serious fallacy is claiming its no different from the situation in the past. We have quite suddenly reached the point where we have filled up the world, and actions that in the past would have been safely absorbed by the non human environment now echo back to haunt us. To see that though, we need the big picture that our communication tools provide. Our unaided senses just don’t get it.

15.

I think the biggest technological change is suddenly having the choice of who to hang out with. Because previously the old saying of "You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family", was still not totally accurate. Most people were limited in choosing their friends by geography. If they wanted to chat about their hobby of model trains, they were forced to hang out with the 3 other model train hobbyists in their city, whether they really liked the guys or not.

And then the internet comes, and they can surf to www.modeltrains.com and find people that fit to them much better than the local club. Even completely weird interests, like virtual world economy :), find their place. The people you hang out with now are not only "real" (what Mrs. Woolley didn't understand), they are actually a better fit than the friends you could have met on the street.

But while technology changes means of communication, and life style, I am not so sure that it changes values. The conflict between being with your family and being with your friends was always there, just the way how you hang out with your friends changed. Thinking that family is more important than friends is still a valid point of view.

16.

Betsy> We all have front row seats to what is possibly the biggest paradigm shift in history. Break out the popcorn.

I agree with this. But forget the popcorn - buckle your seatbelt, I say.

Flatfingers> How is this really different from the alienation every generation experiences from its ancestors?

Avatar-mediated communication erases the physical body from all social calculus. It's a redefinition of self on the magnitude of the Renaissance's discovery human personality and individuality. In other words: a socio-political earthquake of massive proportions with unforseeable consequences. And ideas and norms that took decades to get around by books now take less than a second to circle the globe by internet. We may well see a big part of the effects.

17.

I'm willing to grant that advancing technology can and does change cultures. I'd be one of the first to argue that the printing press is right up there with fire as one of the key inventions in human history. Networked computers may prove even more disruptive.

But although we learn and use new tools for creating new ways of interacting, basic human nature shows no signs of changing. The subconscious motivations that make us want to interact in the first place seem to be an integral part of being human.

The Sumerian astronomer trying to figure out why that bright star moves differently, the Minoan artist capturing the grace of the bull in mid-leap, the Roman legionnaire rubbing his aching feet and wishing he were back home, the Venetian merchant whose mistress complains that he doesn't pay enough attention to her, the Irish immigrant who's just landed in New York City and confidently expects to be running it inside a year, the South Korean teenager toasting monsters in Doom3 -- despite every change of time and place and technology, people still love and hate and laugh and cry and think and feel and act. The forms of how we do these things may vary, but the needs and desires that motivate our beliefs and goals and actions appear to be constant.

Given the constancy of human motivations, I don't see changing technology changing the "alienation" issue any time in the forseeable future.

But the far future may be a different story. I'm thinking of two technologies in particular with the potential to alter the definition of "human": deliberate genetic alteration (for additional lifespan or intelligence), and digital sentience (transferring a living, self-aware mind from a biological substrate into ones and zeros on a computer of some kind).

When the day comes that either of these technologies is widespread, allowing us to change what it means to be human... at that point, all bets are off.

18.

Coming back in late because I spent the last two days arguing with petty bureaucrats over whether they were going to let my daughter start high school on time.

Posted by: Soukyan I would have been telling my son to get in the dining room and eat dinner if I had been in your shoes.
What I did was tell him that the next time he ignored my "dinner in 15 minutes warning", he wasn't going to play CoH for a week. Hasn't been a problem since.
Posted by: greglas: One brief Q: how does the task force differ from the telephone, which has been a feature of teen life since the 60's and 70's. (Remember the Brady Bunch episode about the pay phone?) In other words, does the worldness of VWs introduce something special into the mix?
City of Heroes Task Forces scale the difficulty of their missions to the number of members in the group. If someone drops out in the middle of the mission, the remaining players have to either overcome the odds or bag the TF and start over. People who drop out of TF's mid-mission tend to suffer social censure because of this.
Posted by: Kirk Job-Sluder: Just to pick two nits here, neo-Amish strikes me as a particularly bad choice of terminology here, and in this case is almost perjorative. The Amish reject modernism and contemporary technology as a result of their radical germanic-protestant ideology. "Neo-Amish" implies something that is a modification or revival of that theology, in much the same way that "neo-Paganism" claims to be a modification or revival of pre-Christian belief systems.
There's actually a wide range of differing technology-tolerance among Amish-related groups, from the "Pennsylvania Dutch" traditional Amish that stick to 17th century technology, through those that will use modern farm equipment to work their land but not electrical/electronic equipment in their homes, to some groups whose only obvious distinction from other rural families is that their vehicles lack chrome, their clothes are old-fashioned, and they don't have TV's (I grew up in Montana, where the Mennonites are pretty conspicuous).

The religious motivations aside, the *cultural* distinction of these groups is their rejection or acceptance of various technologies. The "Neo" prefix is my attempt to distinguish the people who reject technology out of simple discomfort or inability to adjust from those who have done so for religion and tradition. I don't see it as perjorative, where "luddite" clearly would be (and doesn't fit).

Posted by: Flatfingers : I guess I'm one of the crowd asking, "How is this really different from the alienation every generation experiences from its ancestors?"

Until the late 20th century, every generation felt alienated from their ancestors, while those still-living ancestors just shook their heads and knew that they'd grow out of it and come to appreciate that in fact they were simply traveling a well-trodden road and would eventually come to wisdom.

Now, what the older generation knows often really *is* irrelevant. How can your grandmother advise you on the ethics and morality of "chat room infidelity"? What paens of wisdom can your grandfather share about how to deal with a nasty compiler bug? We are cut off from our past, with little or no cultural wisdom to guide us in so many of the situations and dilemnas we confront as a matter of routine.

--Dave

19.

Dave says: The religious motivations aside, the *cultural* distinction of these groups is their rejection or acceptance of various technologies. The "Neo" prefix is my attempt to distinguish the people who reject technology out of simple discomfort or inability to adjust from those who have done so for religion and tradition. I don't see it as perjorative, where "luddite" clearly would be (and doesn't fit).

I feel the need to push on this a bit. Arguing that their practice towards technology is the primary cultural distinction is putting the cart before the horse here. These groups don't shun technology because it is technology, but out of a broader critique of external culture grounded in a radical Anabaptist tradition. Using the term "Amish" in a way that has nothing to do with the ideological descendents of Jacob Amman is highly misleading. "Religious motivations aside?" Religious motivations are what make the Amish Amish as opposed to Gene Logsdon homesteader, a neo-luddite, or a buddhist practicing renunciation.

Actually, "neo-luddite" might actually be a better term to describe many technology resisters. The Luddites were also not opposed to technology as technology but the use of technology to disempower working artisans. Perhaps I get a little bit too much joy out poking at my fellow digerati, but I would argue that some moderate neo-luddism is perhaps quite healthy. I think that I'd be a much worse designer and researcher if I didn't have the monthly crisis of consience where I seriously ask myself if I'm wasting my time, and my patron's money on something that won't have a positive social impact.

At any rate, what is wrong with the old standbys from diffusion of innovations reseach, "late adopters" and "resisters?"

Now, what the older generation knows often really *is* irrelevant. How can your grandmother advise you on the ethics and morality of "chat room infidelity"? What paens of wisdom can your grandfather share about how to deal with a nasty compiler bug? We are cut off from our past, with little or no cultural wisdom to guide us in so many of the situations and dilemnas we confront as a matter of routine.

Probably more than you might think actually. After the death of his first wife, Edgar Alan Poe was known to have carried on relationships by correspondence with three different women, frequently plagarizing his own letters. My grandparents didn't invent the "Dear John" letter, that probably goes back to the Romans. At any rate, there is a huge assumption here that "chat room infidelity" is an entirely different beast from the multitude of ways people have been less than completely faithful in the past. My grandmother(if she were alive) would probably tell a story about how it just wasn't right for the husband of a cousin to go to "one of those bars" to look at the women. My grandfather would probably tell a story about how he and his dad looked at a problem with fresh eyes and saw a way around it.

I keep reading these claims that we are in the middle of a revolution, and I just don't see it. I see it as an evolution. The challenge in internet studies is not to think, "this is the internet, everything is brand new," but to see the internet as a new setting where all the old conflicts foibles are played out. Just the other day, a co-worker was describing something that happened in Lineage 2 and after 5 minutes I thought, "Wait a minute, these guys just re-created the Northern European justice system described in Beowulf."

20.

I don't think the problem is that the earlier generation cannot provide wisdom for what the newer generations are dealing with now. I think it's more that a lot of the earlier generations are not making the necessary effort to understand the context resulting from those rapid changes (from sheer exhaustion of keeping up, most likely) well enough to be able to apply their accumulated wisdom and experience in a meaningful manner.

For example, I don't see a huge dissimilarity in epistolary "romance" of past centuries with modern email relationships (or chat room) except for the rapidity of exchanges. That rapidity may be the real issue, however, not only there, but in the pace of change. In any case, if a grandmother can exert enough energy to understand what a chat room is, and that it's real people talking to other real people through masks, though using electronic means instead of pen and paper, she can contribute usefully. But many/most grandmothers today just don't do that.

In the past the velocity of change was not such that the gap between the confort zones of the generations with technology was the gulf it seems to be today.

That said, I know grandparents who make the effort. And they get it. And they do just fine. It takes more effort than it once did. It's by no means impossible.

21.

Wow, what a great topic!

FYI, Margaret Mead developed terms for the different possible positions of older and younger people in a society in her book Culture and Commitment. She described cultures such as the Amish, in which elders play a strong role in perpetuating a culture for years, as postfigurative. In cofigurative cultures, I believe, elder and younger people both took a role in determining the meanings in a culture. And in prefigurative cultures – think situations in which older immigrants find themselves in a new land where they cannot speak the language and therefore are dependent on younger people to translate and negotiate – young people define a culture’s values. There’s a brief discussion of the book up here: http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/devel/kid-c/resources/1-lecture/l-18.htm

We’re clearly in a prefigurative situation here. I agree with the voices in this thread who believe that older people could teach us much about our current situation if they could generalize from their past experiences, making heavy use of metaphor. I don’t necessarily agree that older people need to understand current technology to do so.

However, so many older people – even baby boomers at this point – throw up their hands and act like like they don’t see commonalities anywhere, so younger generations end up doing all the work to explain ourselves. Like Ginger Rogers dancing backwards and in high heels. I’m saying this out of the frustration I’m feeling in my own department –before I can start doing research on video games, I have to prod and plead with certain faculty to just hold a controller in their hands, much less play the game, so that when I explain to them the next thing I want to study they don’t completely misunderstand me and try to channel the discussion into much more ham-fisted questions about video games. Even when they’re not being reluctant to use technology, faculty aren’t necessarily listening to us and trying to understand us. It’s making work hard.

I think that younger generations have an easier time of working with metaphor and comparison to begin with *because* of our experiences with technology… If we’re PC users, we can look at a Mac and go “OK, I know I can copy a file from a hard drive to a floppy on a PC… there must be a way to do that on a Mac, too.” In gaming, we look at a new enemy onscreen and we know from previous experience that we probably shouldn’t run our avatar smack into it. Older generations frequently seem paralyzed when asked to make these generalizations; they’re still worried that they might break something.

Castronova: >Avatar-mediated communication erases the physical body from all social calculus. It's a redefinition of self on the magnitude of the Renaissance's discovery human personality and individuality. In other words: a socio-political earthquake of massive proportions with unforseeable consequences.<

Avatar-mediated communication does not “erase the physical body from all social calculus.” In fact, I think its potential to simulate space and foreground a seemingly physical body in a seemingly physical space is what sets it apart from IM, IRC, email and other forms of electronic communication.

And yes, when we participate in it, it has the potential to redefine self on the grand scale where Ed places it. But will avatar-mediated communication really come to dominate or even influence all human communication? I want a bigger picture, here. VW is part of a media ecology. As the discussion about the neo-luddites suggests, people will probably continue to pick and choose from communication modes for the forseeable future.

I think there are reasons for people not to choose virtual worlds. I sense a lingering taboo around it when I talk to some people. They don’t want to be known as gamers. It still carries the stigma that Woolley’s mother refers to – “it’s not real” – which has long been associated with video games, D&D, science fiction/fantasy, and television/movie fan culture. I’d like to know more about that stigma and how it works.

I’m really hoping we can take a harder look at who games, and why people don’t game or consider themselves gamers. Might the differences between gamers and not-gamers end up producing two or more separate cultures? Could game culture develop in its denizens a radically different sense of self while others continue in the same old sense of self?


22.

gus> "I think there are reasons for people not to choose virtual worlds. I sense a lingering taboo around it when I talk to some people. They don’t want to be known as gamers. It still carries the stigma that Woolley’s mother refers to – 'it’s not real' – which has long been associated with video games, D&D, science fiction/fantasy, and television/movie fan culture. I’d like to know more about that stigma and how it works."

Here's one possible explanation.

Myers-Briggs type theory uses the terms "Intuitive" and "Sensing" to describe the two ends of a key axis of human personality, that being where individuals look for guidance about how to deal with reality. Briefly, Intutives look inside themselves, while Sensors look to the external world.

Someone who tends toward the Sensing side (M-B theory has it) is someone who's naturally inclined to care about what other people think, to prefer the practical to the theoretical, to trust what can be seen and touched over anything abstract. Intuitives incline the other way; they "march to the beat of their own drummer" (if the whole world disagrees, then the whole world is wrong), and they are typically comfortable dealing with logical and emotional abstractions and less motivated by material concerns or interests.

(See http://keirsey.com/pumII/ns.html for more details.)

Fairly extensive sampling over the years has indicated that there are more Sensors than Intuitives (certainly in the U.S. where most research has taken place). The usual estimate is that the Sensing to Intuitive ratio is about 3-1; in other words, in the general population about 75% of people prefer Sensing while 25% prefer Intuition.

(See: http://www.itstime.com/jul2003.htm and http://keirsey.com/cgi-bin/stats.cgi.)

This Sensing majority is used to explain why so many people reject the idea that play has value, and why virtual worlds (and research into them) are so often dismissed as frivolous wastes of time and money.

23.

Ted: But forget the popcorn - buckle your seatbelt, I say.

heh. Choose your metaphor: viewer/event spectator or vehicle/ride. Either way, viva la (r)evolution.

However, as much as I wish I could, I can't agree with this either:

Avatar-mediated communication erases the physical body from all social calculus.

The same social calculus is at very much at work in virtual worlds. Gender, race, and class imbalances are all reinscribed with pretty much the same power dynamics as offline life. Even more so for virtual worlds catering to teens who, trust me, are ALL about social calculus! But I'm on board with the idea that we're going through a massive redefinition of self and believe it has to do with several things mentioned here, including a shift in perspective in which individuals are now conscious of being part of a larger worldwide networked society instead of being limited by geography to a local, nuclear familial one. The speed or the "rapidity of exchange" issue that Dan S mentioned is also important (the seatbelt buckling metaphor really fits nicely there, doesn't it?) and the ability to multitask is part of it too.

Another interesting difference between previous "generation gaps" is how early the gap begins to appear. The age at which kids begin to establish a presence online is getting younger and younger. This weekend I traveled halfway across the country to attend an annual offline gathering of my virtual world buddies - who Mrs. Woolley may be happy to learn are all delightfully real - and thought of this thread when I saw this cyborg baby image in Skymall magazine on the plane. What an image, eh? It's one that can inspire very different reactions from different viewers, depending on how s/he happens to feel about the issues explored in this thread.


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