First Blog Ever

Our second virtual class meeting held in SecondLife last Thursday was a refreshing experience for me considering my first one was not as engaging as I would have liked all at the expense of assisting a friend… apparently the past likes to repeat itself…….. -_-

However, I said that this experience was a better one and it was! Even though I ended up assisting that same friend for the same reason as last time, I actually had time to participate in class this secondtime around! I must admit, the value of SecondLife as a means to hold meetings, not just for classes but for any reason, is immeasurable! Particularly so for our New Media Studies class, within which SecondLife has played an influential role in depicting just what new media is and how it has changed (and perhaps how it will change) our lifestyle.

As alexistracy said in her blog, “SecondLife communication really embraces meta-communication.” Now I want to explore this a bit, this idea of “meta-communication.” At first it seemed as though our class was simply engaging in a normal conversation via voice chat in SecondLife (and text chat as well for those unable to use voice chat). As I thought about it some more it occurred to me that what was going on was not simply a voice chat over the Internet, by no means was it that simple, in fact it was very complex. Here, let me explain. While it may seem as if the only form of communication going on was verbal conversation and text chat, I think there was much more to it. One of the dimensions of ourselves that SecondLife allows us to project is that of a physical appearance i.e. the avatar that we design however we want. Herein lies a portion of the “meta-communication” in that we are able to communicate more than just through voice and text but also through how we design our avatar (essentially depicting our very character as we are or as we want to be). This is a level of communication that had only been possible through face-to-face conversation (I understand that video chat is there as well and can be considered in much the same way, however in SecondLife one’s avatar is not limited by the physical world we live in and therefore opens up many more doors for self-expression). So when we showed up at the class meeting location with our avatars all designed the way we wanted (with the exception of a few who had not customized theirs yet) we brought another level of communication to the conversation, one that was subtle and yet subconsciously influential somehow.

As technology continues to extend its reach in the realm of possibility, we learn new and exciting things about ourselves and how we live, as if our entire life history were repeating itself in a way that hadn’t quite happened before. This revelation will perhaps help us to see how we have lived and consequently help us identify ways in which we can become better, ultimately leading to another… level of existence?

Thanks as always ^_^

EC

~ by erix on November 22, 2009. Tagged: baylor_nms_f09, SecondLife