Interesting Perspectives

Looking back at the blog entry I can’t get out of my head, it appears that there is a response to it from another member from within the same guild. A good read, if nothing else.

I don’t find this response particularly interesting. Perhaps it’s because of the different nature of the two people, but this article is far more laid back about the nature of gaming. “If you enjoy it, and you aren’t sacrificing things in your real life for it, then it’s fine” seems to be the gist of the argument, but the first comment points out the easy counter argument: simply by playing the game, you’re giving up analogue opportunities.

Although this argument could go any number of places, I’m interested in pushing it towards a discussion about embodiment. How does the digital world differ in value and meaning from the analogue world? We all know that the digital world has analogue consequences, and is in someway simply an extension of the analogue world – it’s all located on servers somewhere, and without the analogue world the digital world would cease to exist in some fundamental way.

Yet there seems to be this prevalent opinion that the experiences of the digital world are somehow less than parallel analogue ones. Is it because we are embodied creatures with five senses, and somehow the digital world is a world without those senses (by that do I mean that the two dimensional world lacks touch, smell, etc). Of course the two dimensional world could also lack sound, were it not for speakers, but in some way that is false sound – generated, in some way, not necessarily natural in any sense (but I see that this is a futile argument as well, for what exists that is not natural in some sense? How do you differentiate the natural from the unnatural?).

I wonder if our biggest problem with the internet is its spatiality. That is, when we are on the internet at a computer, we are hooked to that computer in some way. Although people still have problems with cell phones, they are far more accepted in society now than they were when they were invented, and computers have been around far longer than that. One of the biggest differences I see is that someone using a cell phone can move and interact spatially with other human beings, whereas while I blog here and I cannot physically interact with those near me and blog at the same time (unless I can touch them while being tethered to the terminal).

Of course, it also occurs to me that our real problem with the digital world is that it transports us from the analogue world in some intellectual manner. When I’m surfing the web, my attention is no longer in the room on other people. It is focused on pages that are located somewhere else in the world. In this way, surfing the internet is like traveling, and if we all were away from home as much as we surfed the internet, we would probably have similar emotions.