I had expected the readings to be somewhat difficult for me this week. They largely weren’t, which surprised me. Even “A Rape in Cyberspace,” which you might expect to be at least a bit of an uncomfortable read, wasn’t. Not so much.
You know what it was, though? Familiar. The group dynamics afterward, as various members of the group tried to sort out where they stood… I’ve been there, in the role of an admin (or the wizard, in that scenario). I’ve seen the people advocating for lenience after lenience, even after the most heinous stunts. I’ve seen the offenders, casual and flippant as they declare that nothing really matters anyway and nobody can stop them. And I’ve seen people wrestle with reconciling a laissez-faire outlook against the moral clarity that wrong has been done and demands a response of some sort.
Reading about the viewpoint of the trolls was incredibly difficult. I wasn’t surprised by how much it wound me up, but I was surprised that I still wasn’t able to set that aside and examine it objectively from a purely academic standpoint. Even when I was trying to do so. Maybe that’s a strength, or maybe that’s a weakness… but it is, if nothing else, a fact.
I’m not sure that my thoughts on modifying group conversations are useful. I’m 100% sure that the functionality can be implemented, and in a privacy-respecting fashion, but I’m not as confident on whether any of it is a good idea in practice. I’m wary of building systems that will cause groups to fracture as the networks present rapidly become disjoint. At what point does the cure become worse than the disease? But even as unsure as I am about the wisdom of those changes, they are what I might currently propose as an effort to help curtail known problems in that environment.
I wish I didn’t have to reflect on the problem of evil. There’s too much of that in the world as it is, and I want to explore the good things that can be built. I’m already aware of many of the problems. But it’s always going to be useful to revisit and reflect and ensure that nothing has been overlooked as knowledge and experience increase. So it may be uncomfortable, but I don’t believe that it’s without merit. It just leaves me feeling rather hopeless about the entire thing, is all.
Field Trip #2: This time we met up in Gather! I haven’t ever seen or touched Gather before, so this was a fascinating experience. I honestly found the 8-bit style of interface to be really nostalgic. Like, this is right back to Furcadia and the pixelated MUDs / MOOs of old, but right in the browser and much more responsive. Less command-heavy, too.
(Actually, I started off by installing the client software, but couldn’t figure out how to connect to the target world. Worked a lot better once in the browser.)
I ran around for a while looking at the general way the public and private areas work, the desks, and everything else. And at first, I was really quite excited by this. I could immediately see how amazing this could be to replicate an office environment. Even if you were working from home, you could “be” in the office and walk around to have conversations with people.
But the more I thought about it… the more I wondered why we would want to do that. Typically, if we’re working from home, we’re busy. I mean, helpdesk will be answering phone calls and working on customer systems. “Walking around” is more something the senior techs or project folks or managers do. What I was really thinking of was COVID! During COVID, none of us could see or interact with each other for weeks on end, and I imagine we would have welcomed some virtual socialization in a virtual office… but thankfully, we’re not dealing with a pandemic all the time. And absent that kind of external blockade on all socialization, I think the appeal of having a “virtual office” would quickly wear off and not be worth it.
And then everybody else arrived and we could start experimenting. 🙂
I liked how the video and audio faded in as you approached people. That’s a great feature. The games were adequate, but nothing to write home about. In a pandemic, that might suffice for a “staff outing” for half an hour or something (before people moved on to real games outside of Gather). The “follow me” feature was a good idea, and I can see that being especially useful in a larger virtual environment. I also liked the variety in sizes of private space. You could have a few people around a desk, or a one-on-one in a couple of chairs across a coffee table, or a solo “quiet” working environment, or a meeting room that bypassed the distance-based faders of public space–in the meeting room, everybody could see and hear everybody else, regardless of distance. That amount of variety seemed like it was well-considered.
I think this is going to go into my bag of tech-tricks. Probably not something I’m going to suggest outside of another pandemic, but I like it and want to keep an eye on it.
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