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The Forum > Article Comments > Virtual worlds - it's time to take out the intellectual trash > Comments

Virtual worlds - it's time to take out the intellectual trash : Comments

By Malcolm King, published 5/12/2007

Academics please take note: the virtual world is one of entertainment and gratification, and it isn't real.

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DJ Cure,

I'm sure the author is, like Sideshow Bob, fully aware of the irony of appearing on a particular medium in order to decry it.

Conniesec,

Does your avatar eat, sleep and poo for you?
Posted by dozer, Saturday, 8 December 2007 9:57:45 AM
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in response to dozer,

Well, fully aware or not, it's contradictory when using such absolute statements. So somewhere in the writers heart and mind, they either believe there is some validity in using the web for "serious dialog", or there is some other agenda or feeling that takes them away from logic and understanding of technology. How am I to trust an idea that can't acknowledge the value in the tool which their both bashing and using to inform me? Logically, this is lacking. The internet platform is where we take the virtual and give it meaning for the purpose of communication. We don't need things to be real to provide value. If you want to bash virtual worlds for this reason, you have to scale the concept to all communication technologies such as the telephone.

I have my reservation for the virtual though as well. It is simply a platform for people. And people are flawed, some corrupt. And technology breathes room for deception and distortion. But if you want some more of my thoughts, feel free to read my blog http://www.rezyourmind.com
Posted by DJ Cure, Sunday, 9 December 2007 3:14:07 AM
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As an oldie who knows history back beyond Socrates, and seeing that intellect also includes lessons learnt from history, one is unsure what the author is getting at ?

Or does he or she mean what is now coming out of the old/new corporate culture, the new coming out of the present age where persons rely on cute electronics so much, particularly in conversation , but also in learning, they never find time to spend time alone in deep thought, just as Socrates would intimate, let the thoughts run deeper than just behind the eyes and ears .

Maybe it’s because we are getting so close to Christmas, that a dumb public as well as politicians have put Middle East problems aside for the time being?

But possibly the most astounding news so important to any historian, was the finding in US archives of a statement of regret by Nixon that he had allowed Israel to go militarily nuclear, but the most astounding was one by Kissinger whose statement that Israel’s international crime would have future serious problems in the Middle East, because letting such a tiny nation be allowed the use of atomic weaponry, did not augur well for future peace in the area?

Looks like the wily Kissinger pretty well predicted back in the 1960s, what has happened since, including the US attack on Iraq, and Cheney’s desire to do the follow up with a coming attack on Iran.
Posted by bushbred, Monday, 10 December 2007 1:11:58 PM
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Malcolm does well to give a serve to (academic and other) hype that proselytizes the wonders of the ‘information revolution’ and echoes long-held modernist faith in technological change as inherently progressive. But he does a great disservice to intellectual ideas by slanging off at ‘poststructuralists’ and ‘faddist academics,’ using superficial summaries of richly nuanced debates to take pot shots at them – having ‘fun’ by taking pomos ‘down a peg’ is not a constructive expression of discomfort with those whose views are different from one’s own, and mainstream, modernist ideas.

What sort of ‘proof’ would satisfy him that ‘social spaces exist in cyberspace’? He implies there’s some scientific way of doing this. I’ve been convinced by critical and historically sensitive arguments (eg, see Andrejevic, Mark. ‘The Webcam Subculture and the Digital Enclosure,’ in Mediaspace: Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age, edited by Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy. New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 193-208), just as these arguments have applied, and continue to apply to other media, which create social spaces where people can interact (this forum, letters in newspapers, any interactive TV shows).

The interesting issue is whether these are *‘new’* social spaces, and how much they replicate just more of the same RL (‘real life’) social spaces. I suspect Malcolm and I would be able to find some agreement in answering the former question if he would just open his mind a bit about what could constitute a social space. Mark Andrejevic argues that ‘new’ webcam and other interactive media virtual spaces, whilst part of digital transformations, are not revolutionary. They are being exploited commercially as digital enclosures in an on-line economy that spills over from RL, with historical similarities to the 18th and 19th century spatial transformations of industrialisation that involved the takeover of the Commons land by private ownership and the concentration of labour in and within the factories.

Viviane Morrigan
Posted by Viviane, Monday, 10 December 2007 3:29:56 PM
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“So computer games are good for childhood or teenage literacy because they have to read the instructions? Pigs might fly. The fields of imagination are greenest when one is allowed to travel through literature unguided, rather than be directed by a computer programmer's vision.”
I didn’t know you were preparing to air your intellectual trash on us when I read the subject. If you don’t understand what games are out there and what they are doing with games, and how much reading goes into playing them… then you shouldn’t write about it as a side note to a point you may actually have a valid opinion on. Reading a book left to right, the same words every time –IS NOT- a greener field of imagination than a game that lets you choose multiple different story endings and plot points for character development and the subsequent climax. Your green pasture may as well be a 4x4 cell with green walls. There’s no excuse for your small minded opinion to be aired so destructively as to affect the views of your readers. You who claim to be an intellectual should be promoting your readers to be informed, but without offering an informed opinion or at least some quantified information to dissect for ourselves, you are hindering the intellectual process with this tripe you have so ironically posted up on your own feared medium of the internet.
The rest of it seems well thought out… did your editor muscle in the 9th grade jabs for shock value?
Posted by sevenvt, Tuesday, 11 December 2007 5:47:49 AM
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Sevent, has King hit a nerve? Ignore him. He has written extensively on politics and creativity but I'd say you're right that virtual worlds might not be his forte.

He has a knack of 'pissing people off' but he still makes interesting reading, although he sometimes doesn't check his facts. He's a cultural conservative and comes down heavily on the side of books and what I'd call 'core educational values'.

Reporters scan OLO and look for conflict stories. King knows that so he goes for the soft under belly of the latest organisational or IT phenomena. King has written a major article on multi-online players for Singapore (I checked on newstext) but don't give him the satisfaction of your venom.

Are you an on line gamer?
Posted by Cheryl, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 4:01:58 PM
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