Cyberstalking

A friend recently asked me to have a look into what legal protections are available to someone who is being stalked online. Their query was complicated by the victim being in a different country than the stalker. I approached the issue by researching the relevant law in both countries, and then shifted my focus to any international law that might apply. Researching law covering the Internet is always both interesting and complicated since the relevant technology is always evolving, and the law is always necessarily a few steps behind as it tries to grapple with new ways that people come up with to abuse that technology. After a while the same themes became apparent through-out the literature, I’m going to talk about them in this post.

In the past I have written on the prevalence and personalities of Second Life stalkers, and on the relationship between law and technology. Feel free to have a hunt through the rest of my blog if you want further background on my views on such matters. This post though will primarily focus on what appear to be the current legal attitudes towards cyberstalking.

One of the biggest problems for law that should be able to cover cyberstalking, is that it’s working from the fundamentals of real life stalkers. So the focus is on people who have physical access to you and therefore pose a “real” threat – these people are of course in your own country and thereby covered by the same laws as you live under. This real world focus also means your stalker is easily identified – you know their name or the way they look. As soon as you move into the virtual world you lose two of those key elements required under stalker laws – even laws that have been modified or created to reflect the use of new technology: Those two elements being the idea that the stalker is in the same jurisdiction as you, and that they are not anonymous.

There appears to be a trend away from requiring the potential for physical harm from your cyberstalker; recognition that harassment short of fear for your safety (or your job loss in employment legislation), is an event the law should still be interested in. There are also steps you can take to help identify your stalker – through the assistance of the ISP of the offender, and the help of the organisation responsible for the service through which you are being harassed (such as Second Life).

The two main methods for getting help to stop the cyberstalker – whether in your own country or abroad – appear to be as follows:

1 Reporting them to the Police

Because the law has this nasty habit of frequently changing, and varies so much country to country, your best bet is to talk directly to your local police about the situation and ask what you can do about it. There may not be law to directly cover your situation, but you might as well find out, and at the very least they will be able to point you in the right direction for alternative options. If the police show no interest in your complaint or are excessively unhelpful, I have read some suggestions that you just go above their heads to the next policing level (whatever that may be in your specific country), and keep working your way up the policing system until you get some attention to your personal plight and the issue more generally. It will be very important that you have kept records of the stalker’s communications with you. It will also be important that you have on record that you clearly asked them to stop all future communications (only do this once though – I’ll talk about that further below).

2. Reporting them to the Service Providers

You should advise any organisation who’s service is being used to stalk you, that this is happening. Companies don’t want to be seen to allowing stalking or being party to such activities, and will generally be happy to help you out. In regards to Second Life, please use this link to view their requirements for reporting stalkers, and suggestions for dealing with them in-world. Their own suggestions mirror the self-help advice I’ll now go through.

I find it useful to separate the advice for how to cope with cyberstalking through self-help, into two categories: The before and the after.

1. The Before

There are certain steps you can take to protect yourself from attracting or assisting cyberstalkers. These include not making available personal information through any public forums or profiles, using names that don’t provide any personal information (gender neutral names are often suggested), and protecting and frequently changing passwords.

2.The After

Once you’ve got yourself a cyberstalker, it’s important that you tell them to stop communicating with you, and only tell them once. After you’ve done this, stop all future communication with them – mute them for example. Also tell your friends not to communicate with them and to mute them. Do not begin communicating with them again, no matter what they say to you and your friends – if they try to threaten you into action you have even more grounds to go to the police and get them to take legal action – keep it all on file including your own responses (which should be non-existent after you tell them to leave you alone).

Many sites I went to suggested you do everything in your power to make sure they cannot contact you, including leaving your old accounts, changing your name, your email address, etc. This will especially be the suggestion where the service is set up in such a way that the offender can simply create new accounts to stalk you from, after their old ones get shut down. You’re going to be asking yourself why you should be the one to leave your old accounts and change everything when you’ve done nothing wrong – it’s just further punishment for yourself. Whether you take those extra steps to get away from the stalker will depend on how badly the stalking is upsetting you and how persistent it is – if you’ve got to do that to make it stop, then do that you must. It’s a shame if it gets to that point of course, but considering just how bad stalking can get, you might want to cut it off by taking those steps before it gets any worse and ruins other aspects of your life.

I’ve also come across the argument line that if you do things that allow, encourage or make it easy for people to stalk you, then you lose grounds to complain about the predictable behaviour that ensues. For example, if you put up sexually suggestive pictures of you on a public site and then get a bunch of sexual advances from strangers, you should have expected that reaction and can’t legitimately complain about it. That sounds a lot like the old rape law reasoning that women sent out sexually available messages by wearing short skirts, so men couldn’t be blamed for following through on them. Obviously there’s an enormous difference between being raped because you wore a short skirt, and being stalked online because you put a picture of you in skimpy lingerie on your profile, but the idea that you bring harassment on yourself and therefore lose a remedy against it, seems a tad off, no?

The issue of cyberstalking is further complicated by issues of what is considered harassment by one party, might be fine behaviour to someone else: Many jurisdictions appear to require an objective aspect, such as whether a reasonable person would feel harassed or fearful of the behaviour. It is exceptionally easy to accuse someone of cyberstalking you too. Every area of law has problems of evidence, policy and enforcement, and cyberstalking is utterly fraught with these.

After all my research – both through opinion pieces and legal materials – I come to this overall summary: If the stalker is in your jurisdiction and you have their identity, you have a good chance that your local laws will provide you some protection. If they are cyberstalking you from another jurisdiction, you can still make inquiries of your local police but are less likely to get a remedy. You still have available to you the options outlined above of taking the matter to the service providers involved, and self-help. It appears that the lack of a consistent international approach to the issue, in what is an ever developing area of the law, will often leave the victim with a confusing and distressing situation, but I hope this post helps some of you a little.

Identity

While I was living it, I’d often reflect on what my Second Life meant – what it revealed about me that I might otherwise have ignored or denied or being oblivious to. Months after leaving I still think about it, though less often now, but there are things I’ll read or see or hear about that remind me to discover and contemplate the lessons that world and those people taught me. Tonight as I got ready for bed – rubbing creams into my pregnancy parts to avoid stretch-marks and planning what time to get up tomorrow to be fully dressed and aware by the time my son’s physiotherapist turns up – I found myself reading this paragraph in a random blog about mothering:

“All of us struggle with the demands of motherhood at times and the feeling that your true identity is suppressed and in danger of disappearing altogether. But does it make it better that we confess that feeling to thousands of complete strangers?”

For me, Second Life was primarily a social experience. And as an intrinsic aspect of that experience in a virtual world full of people I’d never met (and may never meet), it was also always about identity. Identity is a subject that I could write about indefinitely, much in the same way that our search to label and comprehend our identities is a life-long pursuit. Within Second Life I thought I had found a way to express a vital part of my identity that was being utterly suppressed and lost in the real world – a safe place where I could be “me” (whatever that was), without consequence, fear or judgment.

Problem was there were consequences, there was fear, and god knows there was judgment. I resented that for a long time; I wanted just one place in this world where I could feel free, and I couldn’t even find it in a virtual world behind a different name. But, with time, I came to accept that I had to make my reality what I was seeking in the fake world – I had to incorporate those fun, social suppressed elements of my personality back into my everyday life, and not find alternate ways to cope with or accept the “loss”.

And what caused the “loss” – the loss of me, of my energy and creativity and “true” identity..? Well that’s the question I should have been focusing on all along. And that’s where the quote from that blog above, got to me at my core: I am a mother. That’s what changed. Not only am I a mother, I am a mother of a kid who remained undiagnosed as autistic during the huge majority of my time in-world. I was lost and confused and blaming myself and my husband for problems that we hadn’t caused in any blameworthy sense: We didn’t do anything to cause his autism, besides creating his life in the first place. Any new mother will go through a crisis of identity as she redefines herself in relation to a new life she created – as she becomes responsible for every part of a life she created. That necessary forces you to tone yourself down a bit. So maybe you feel like you’ve lost parts of yourself, and maybe you have, but you’ve also gained hugely important things that you’d never want to exist without too. So it is no surprise that as a mother of a special needs kid, going through the blame game because I didn’t know what was wrong with him, that I got more than a little lost too.

I was wrong to turn to complete strangers to fix that loss and to find my identity, I should have searched for the answers here in the real world. I ended up hiding in a virtual world when I should have been fighting for my real one. That virtual world helped me in some ways, and maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this now otherwise – now a hopeful proud mother who sees the life-long fight ahead of her and is ready for it. There’s a fair chance I’d be divorced and more lost than ever without what Second Life gave me. But there’s as just a good chance that if I hadn’t found somewhere to hide like that, that I would have kicked into gear sooner and stronger and turned all that energy into accepting and embracing the identity I now have – the true me. The me that reflects what the fact that I wake up beside my husband every morning, spend all day with my son and his therapists, go to bed at night by my husband, and dream of my future with the baby inside me.

I couldn’t find a way to fit Second Life into my life as it currently stands, so I left Second Life in favour of my first life. So many times I tried to deal with the conflict by ignoring my first life in favour of my second one. I am glad that I made the right decision eventually. Maybe in the future I find find a way to mesh the two together in some sort of harmony, but at the same time I hope I never want to again: I hope that I have now fully accepted the idea that I must make my first life as much as possible match the ideal I hold of who I really am. I hope that now when I seek escapism and understanding and acceptance, that I will have the strength to find it in the real world – in the arms of my husband or the passion of a mother or the ambition of a lecturer. All the various parts of my life that make up who I am, that form my identity, here, and now. If I return to Second Life it won’t be to relive my idiotic youth and pretend I’m free from things I’ve come now to accept, it will be to socialise purely as real me; as me as I can be.

Illness

Just a quick post to let my Second Life friends and blog-readers know that I haven’t written in a while because I’m very unwell. As you know I’m three months pregnant, and suffered with very bad morning sickness (which lasts all day) for the last two months or so, and I thought I was getting a bit better. Problem is I now have rather severe anaemia (also caused by the pregnancy), which means I spend most of every day lately lying in bed unable to move, despite also sleeping for over 12 hours a night. I have brief spurts of energy (like now) that I use as much as possible to do simple things like get dressed and go to the bathroom, so getting online is well down that list.

This also means of course that I haven’t had the chance to read any comments made to any of my posts over the past week or so. But I have noticed my inbox filling with a few concerned voices asking if I was OK, and writing this quick post to say “yep I’m alive, but I’m not well right now” was the quickest way to deal with that. So thank you for your concern, and hopefully I’ll be back soon.

Quacking Elephant

My latest “light relief” post is about to drop off the bottom of the page, so it’s time to post another one to break up the more serious side of this blog. This time I’m sharing one of my all-time favourite segments from the improv-comedy show, “Whose Line is it Anyway?”. It’s five minutes long, but it’s worth it. It’s one of those clips that make me laugh every time. The first time I watched it on TV I actually laughed so hard I was crying (as is the host pretty much by the end of segment as you’ll see). I’ve learnt that what we find funny differs immensely person to person, but I hope it at least makes you smile ^^

Watch Quacking Elephant

Second Life – more than love and lust?

We’ve all heard read the articles about Second Life from those “outsiders”, who cast it as a sordid world of lust and adultery. And we’ve all read the “insider” blog posts from residents crying out for our world to be seen as more than that. But is it really so surprising that it’s been reflected for what it dominantly is..? And is it really realistic for us to ask the rest of the world to portray it as the small aspects so few of us actually engage in – the education, the research, the business meetings?

It is primarily a social world – by a huge proportion the people I met in Second Life joined it to socialise, and some very expressly and openly joined it for the sex and love. In fact the same media articles and documentaries that Second Life residents attack as unfairly making it appear as a sex haven, is often what draws in the new members. To push my point further though, the few people I have met in-world who expressly joined for educational or research purposes, stayed around to specifically engage in the relationship and sex side. It is also totally normal and common for people who are in Second Life to make money by running businesses, to have relationships of sex and love with other residents. I used to be a Second Life Mentor and during my frequent visits to Orientation Islands, I had to deal with new avatars asking me for sex and if I’d be their girlfriend – this from people who have only just learnt how to type into the chat box.

Getting annoyed at people and organizations for focusing so much on the sex and relationship sides of Second Life, would be like a brothel getting angry at people overlooking the art they have in their waiting area, rather than say a university getting angry because all the media talks about is who’s sleeping with who among their lecturers and students (and refusing to run stories about their academic achievements).

Sex and love are not all there is to Second Life, but it is a huge component of why people join and why they stay, and what they do while they are there. Second Life is an international world and love and sex are international languages – they are topics we all take an interest in. So why be surprised, disappointed or upset when media reports on something so obvious, and frankly, so interesting? There are a lot of problems with using Second Life for business meetings and education – the lag, the down-times, the rez issues. Until these factors are more stable and reliable, and less maddingly frustrating, it would be odd to expect such serious and time-sensitive activities to truly take off in-world.

The anonymity of a Second Life existence, and the ability to do it from inside your own home, under the very nose of the person you might be cheating on or trying to hide your desires from, lends itself perfectly to the sorts of stories that keep making headlines, especially the adultery. We all know so many more stories about what really happens in Second Life that never make it to the ears of the media – the stories we could all tell! But we don’t, and that’s great. But where do we get off telling off the organisations and people who do get to hear about these stories from the effected parties, and tell the rest of the world what we already know? Why do we insist it isn’t a realistic portrayal of Second Lives, when in my two years in Second Life it was highly accurate of what I saw and heard about? And don’t think I was hanging out in sex clubs or going to bdsm sims, because I wasn’t. Imagine how much stronger my view would have been if I did!

Many new technologies are eagerly adopted by people with sexual motives – such as video tapes, film and the Internet. For a while they were dominantly perceived as intended for lewd unsavory purposes, before they “evolved” to wider use. I suppose Second Life is somewhat like that, and in time is slowly “evolving away” from those more love and lusty origins. And the people crying “foul” over its portrayal in the media are hoping they can help shift it along. Whatever the motivation may be, I don’t think we should deny that it’s essence continues to be a social platform, and quite a sexual one too. And you know what, I don’t exactly think that’s a bad thing either – many lonely lost souls are finding what they’re looking for in-world.

Maybe Second Life is too “tainted’ to ever make that leap from sexy lovey place, to business / educational realm. Maybe it will always be like saying you buy Penthouse for the articles. Whereas people are hoping it will one day be more like saying you don’t read National Geographic to look at the bare-chested women. Time will tell, but I’m not convinced that time has come just yet.

Motivations, and the way women think…

I went through a stage of strongly disliking women. It was a rather long stage to be honest. Maybe is was brought on by being surrounded by women at home, and from going to an all girls school, and getting to the stage where I’d had quite enough thank you very much. Or maybe it was because I didn’t like myself very much if you wanna get all psycho-analysy on me. Whatever the background to it, I can say with a fair bit of confidence the things about women that irritated me so damn much. Somewhere near the top of that list was the endless analysis of what people said – instead of listening to and responding to the actual words, many women have the annoying habit of obsessing over the motivations for the words and the “hidden meaning”, even when the author clearly says there was none.

In turn, women tend to have a habit of not saying what they mean either: They have hidden messages and unspoken motivations, so that to truly understand what is being said to you at any point in time you have to analyse their words in the wider context of what is going on in their lives, their relationships, etc, even if the particular conversation is otherwise completely separate from those things. These multiple levels of communication that women tend to engage in, can easily lead to hurt feelings where none is intended.

I became conscious of this and the fact that I often did it too, around my mid teens. At first I thought it was just “normal communication” – we should always be trying to fully understand the message being sent out, and the context must be taken from as much information as possible. But as I observed it more, I realised it was a frequent tool for manipulation, intimidation and escaping the consequences for if the actual thoughts had been verbalised – inching around the real topic so if things didn’t go as they liked they could wriggle their way to pretend it was never what they meant and how dare you insinuate it! Even though anyone listening would have realised with some thought what they were getting at.

I became quite “male” in my communication – I said what I meant, people knew where they stood with me, if I wanted something I said so and oddly enough I was more successful getting what I wanted than when I used the more circumspect version of communication. Men loved my company and on many occasions I had them tell me I wasn’t like other women – I listened to what they said, and responded to their actual words, not their supposed motivations. I even had one guy who was very open about his misogyny (he was proud of it and believed women were inferior), say that I was one of the only women he’d encountered that he thought was worth talking to. Yay me..?

Every time I got dragged back into the world of female communication I ended up in situations of polite lies and back-stabbing and never saying what was meant anymore. It was horrible. Sometimes when I talk to women on the phone or online I feel like just grabbing them and shaking them “tell me what you mean, just say it, just say what you mean and mean what you say!” I understood their version of communication because I was bought up completely surrounded by it, but I didn’t like it and didn’t want to take part in it. And being around it bought out the worst in me too.

I find the same thing in blogging. Women writers tend to not just say what they mean and are often motivated by something unsaid. They also assume that other bloggers are always writing from some hidden motivation that they must ferret out and speak to, instead of just addressing the points actually made in the post itself. In fact I often find that it is the women who will not speak to the words of the post at all and will go off on what looks like some complete tangent – but is just reflecting what they thought the post was really about.

Second Life is dominantly populated by women, or at the very least by people who want to pass themselves off as women. Which perhaps made it a less than ideal place for me to socialise. In world my closest friends were frequently men, and my circle of friends was always more populated by men than women. That was my comfort zone. My biggest problems in-world were always caused by other women: If you have an issue with a guy you can thrash it out openly, if you have an issue with a woman you could expect them not to actually tell you directly, and you were expected not to tell them directly either.

When I was managing Crown & Pearl, the issues that arose with male patrons were always the easier ones to deal with for this reason, but the problems with female patrons would often drag on and hardly if ever get resolved because they wouldn’t say up front what they were thinking or why they did what they did, you had to play a constant guessing game. I saw the exact same thing happening at Three Lions before it went under too [note please, I'm not implying C&P will go under now or ever, I've had to insert this clarification now before anyone reads in that unintended message *sighs*] – all the bitchy rumblings I heard in those end days came from women. And where there were men behind the rumblings there was inevitably a strong female personality behind the scenes directing their hand.

Or maybe I was just pre-determined to read the situation in that way…

My closest friend in the real world is a female. She is quite like me. We are emotional wee bunnies but we say what we mean to each other, we don’t mince our words, and we talk very openly about our lives. There isn’t a hidden sub-dialogue. She isn’t fond of the “typical” woman either – she doesn’t like the way they rarely say what they mean and don’t mean what they say. We both prefer male company but nevertheless enjoy each other’s company – for the same reasons men enjoy her and my company no doubt.

You may have noticed in my posts lately that I keep saying at the end what motivated them. That has been to counter the email and blocked troll comments that keep accusing me of being motivated by factors that have absolutely nothing to do with the words in the post. I am frequently motivated by tv shows, movies, books and real world experiences, not everything I write about is a result of the limited pieces of my life these people have access to. I mean my words to be taken as they are. Furthermore, those extra commentaries that are annoying me so much, are invariably coming from females. Thus the gist of this whole post.

Of course there are men who are quite effeminate in the way they think and talk, and of course there are women (like me) who tend to be more male. But there are also very strong differences and trends in the way the two sexes communicate. It’s caused by all sorts of things – by hormones and socialisation and expectations etc. But whatever it’s caused by doesn’t change the fact that I don’t enjoy the ‘typical” female style of conversation. And as my body is flooded with these frickin hormones for the pregnancy I find my mind creeping into those female ways – over-analysing, and crying at the slightest provocation, and being driven by instinct more than reason. I suppose even this post is a reflection of my current over-analysing trend. Ah well. Do me a favour anyway and don’t read some hidden message into it. It is what it is, and that is all I want it to be. Attack it as much as you like (I have no doubt it has offended a few people, though offence was not its aim), but at least attack the words. K? Thankies.

Immortality, Identity, and Virtual Worlds

As self-aware creatures, who can plan into the future and reflect on our pasts, it’s an equally understandable trait that we’re concerned about our mortality. And in turn, our immortality. I fully intend to live on after I die – in people’s memories, in lessons I teach my students, in records of degrees conferred, in a magazine I appeared in, and of course through the existence of my children (and their eventual children). Of course I won’t know that I live on in those ways, but the idea that I will do so comforts and satisfies me now. I exist. People will know I did, and that I effected the world.

Virtual worlds remind us of our mortality: Our avatars don’t get sick, don’t age, and need never die. In fact when we force them to do these things, it is usually treated as an odd thing to do. The “norm” is that we all look like adults in our early twenties, in a healthy weight range and without liver spots, at the very least, that is how we first appear as noobs (unless something has changed since I last created an alt). To be honest, I’ve always found it odd that people would make their avatars do things which counter this impression. Even making your avatar pregnant seems like a stark reminder of mortality to me: Planning to give birth acknowledges the fact that we once didn’t exist, and will someday come to cease to exist again.

In fact there is no reason you can’t pass along your virtual identity to someone else if you wanted, and in such a way really live on after you’re gone (from Second Life, or real life). I had a very close Second Life friend who took part in exactly that – the account she was using started off as someone else’s. There are benefits to this of course – you’re automatically payment and age verified if they were too, plus you get their left over lindens, their inventory, and no one thinks you’re a noob. Second Life and virtual worlds haven’t been around long enough to really get a grasp on the potentials of this. You could very much so end up with multiple Dread Pirate Roberts – with people passing on their reputation, skills and legacy to multiple people over time.

Indeed, many people already treat their Second Life identities as completely separate from their real life ones – be it through changes in gender, age or any other unlimited identifier. Is it so much of a leap that their personas could continue after the real world original owner is gone?

If you’ve built up an empire based around your name, one that is financially valuable and consisting of the sorts of skills that could be taught to someone else, then it would make sense to be open-minded to the idea of similarly selling the identity once you no longer can or want to use it.

The obvious problems with this idea are friends lists and Linden Labs making grumpy noises at you for not using the correct identity with them. Neither problem is insurmountable though, friends lists can be deleted or added to as required, the relationships can be redefined or advised as suits. I also can’t see any solid reason for Linden Labs perhaps not allowing this sort of passing-along of identities under recognition that an avatar’s name and reputation can be a valuable commodity. As long as they have the correct details at swap over, isn’t that what matters? And even if that wouldn’t make Linden Labs happy, how likely are they to figure out that the identity has been passed along anyway, or to be able to prove it..?

The point of this whole mental exercise is just to come to terms with what it would mean to really let our avatars be immortal – to live on after us. For our actions to be part of a long history of one name. In the same way that the Dread Pirate Roberts captivates the imagination, and holds a certain epic appeal, could not our avatar names do the same?

What tends to happen instead though is when people die their avatars are publicly put to rest too – we either don’t contemplate, or don’t want, our avatars to exceed that one boundary of real life, even though we use them to exceed all other real world boundaries. When people argue that their Second Lives are completely separate from their real lives, they clearly don’t mean it. They still hold tight to its own continuity – they don’t share their account passwords with other people, either during or after they regularly use it themselves. We can of course understand why – because friendships are formed with other people who they might not want to deceive or confuse. But I wish people would. I’d love to see what a world of constantly changing users behind a singular identity would look like. I’d love to find out I was in some intense relationship with someone I’d never met, or that I was a villain on a sim which I’ve just discovered for the first time, or that I’m famous for something I’d never done. Now that would be real role-playing! You’d never get bored, every log in would be an unexpected adventure. (I was given the details to log into a semi-famous avatar a while back but never did it, more fool me!).

It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but considering how many people leave Second Life from boredom, it might help! What people enjoy doing in Second Life varies so greatly from person to person, and I could easily see a market for this. Or at the very least, I would be prepared to experiment with it. And isn’t that what Second Lif is all about at the end of the day – pushing boundaries and experimenting..?

Hmm. Just thoughts anyway. It seems to me that we are barely scratching the surface of what Second Life offers in terms of identity, and at the fringes of identity, immortality.

Oh by the way, if you’re wondering where all this is coming from, it’s because I just finished the (horribly long) graphic novel “From Hell“, which investigates the many identities of Jack the Ripper, and casts him as someone who sees himself as extending prior to and past his individual existence. I will not be impressed if someone tries to cast these thoughts as motivated by the Rheta Shan incident. In fact, please stop assuming my posts are motivated by anything other than my own mind – it is not the motivation that matters, but what I say that should matter. Just take this post for the crazy pointless musing that it is! Though for all its crazy pointlessness, still feel free to tell me that you think it is just that

Penpals, Second Life, and Blogging

About twenty years ago – before the Internet was a household word (let alone a household necessity) – I collected penpals. These were people I’d never met, and likely never will meet. I found them through various means – a popular kids show gave out details of people wanting penpals and the newspapers would run details of kids looking for the same. Over a matter of months I ended up with over twenty regular correspondents. Receiving and writing the letters was an attractive thing in itself for me  – I got satisfaction from receiving mail and from being diligent enough to reply so quickly to each one I received. Over time though I became bored with them – with the things they were telling me in their letters (”I went to school today, I have a horse”) and with the things I was writing back (”I went to school today, I have a cat”). So I let the correspondence trickle down to only maintaining contact with a few of my favourites. And eventually with none at all.

Twenty years later…

About two years ago I joined Second Life, where I interacted with people I’d never met in person and likely never would meet. I found them through various means – hanging out at my online pub or because they IMed me to say they liked my Second Life art or blog. Talking to these people was an attractive thing in itself for me – I got satisfaction from the social contact and was proud of maintaining so many friendships; every IM I received got a reply. You get where this is going, right?

I’m not saying every single person and every single conversation I had in-world became boring and predictable (that would be cruel and inaccurate), but it sure did start to feel that way about the vast majority of people I spoke to. I realised I was spending literally hours everyday not saying or learning anything new. And just like with the penpals, I realised that if I put a fraction of that time back into my real-world friends and family, I would be nurturing relationships that would lead to our kids playing together someday, to us having a meal together at cafes, to being there to help move house for each other, and go to the beach to share the sun and the waves. I used to think I would meet my Second Life friends someday – and I still hold hope for two in particular – but let’s face it, I have one special-needs kid and I’m pregnant with the next child, unless someone comes to me I’m not meeting any of them in the foreseeable decades.

So as I shifted my social focus from people I’d never meet to people I will probably meet and to the people already in my life, I also shifted to blogging. The beauty of blogging is you can tell beforehand if it’s worth spending your precious time reading the words – you can only go to the pages of people who interest you, and even then can choose to only read the articles that are of interest too. Through the blogs, not only can I focus my time and attention, I can also develop friendships with only those people who are attracted to what I say (or how I say it), and me in turn to them for the same reasons – rather than feeling obligated (and yes I actually felt obligated) to maintain friendships with complete strangers I had nothing in common with that randomly happened to walk into the same virtual bar I worked at. And if I’m bored or busy I can go silent for days on end – on their blogs and my own – and no one thinks any worse of it.

I only came to blogging because of Second Life and so it is about that world and those experiences that I continue to read and write about. After all, I spent two years of life there, pretty much everyday, and many hours a day. That is not an insignificant activity. I still miss the everyday in-world conversations sometimes, and who knows maybe some day I’ll actually miss it enough to return to it, but for now the combination of blogging and the spending time with people here with me in the real world, is making me feel happy and content (and that’s saying a lot for an emotional preggy lady ^^).

The Little Bitch in all of us <3

We all have a critical nasty side. Everyone. It’s only natural – we have our own ideas of beauty and acceptable behaviour and what words you can and cannot say to your mother. Pretending we don’t creates all sorts of other nastiness (which I’ll get to in a second). There’s a time and place though. Good times: When you’re alone with your best friend, or chilling out with your lover. Bad times: When you’re blogging or are standing in a crowded room. Even if you simply must let loose in the more public situations though, you can get away with it if you use a little discretion and avoid using actual names. There will always be a right time for using names in public forums of course – but those times it doesn’t actually count as bitchiness, it’s usually more a matter of critique of a publicly shared view or whatever. I’m getting away from my point. Back to the bitch in all of us..

When we pretend we’re angels and have never had a bad thought, let alone said a bad word, about other people, we set ourselves up for failure. You create an image you simply won’t be able to live up to, and you’ll constantly be biting your tongue to try to maintain it. If you were smart enough to let a little bitch show now and then from the start, then it’s less likely to startle or shock people later on – they know you have that streak about you and will learn to shrug or laugh or ignore it, rather than “zomg” in your direction. You’ll also end up with the “what’s wrong, what happened, how can I fix you..?” police in your IM ear, as people try to make sense of this out-of-character outburst.

The other problem with playing the angel and expecting it from everyone around you, is you’re pretending that your expectations of other people are realistic; inevitably they will fall short of your standards and either come crawling to you for forgiveness, or frankly just not give a shit anymore what you think because they can’t be bothered fighting their true opinions all the time around you.

It’s an interesting point in regards to the sorts of critiques you get when you step out of line: If you say something nasty about someone, certain people will jump up and down complaining that it’s unfair to judge and you just don’t understand them – they are complex creatures with complex experiences that you’re over-looking! Your reply should be “so am I”: Why is your opinion – even if it is a negative one – be “judged” by people who claim that “judgement” itself is a bad thing?

I call bullshit on that by the way – “judgement” is not a bad thing. It is absolutely fine (and to be encouraged) that we judge people and situations. We have notions of right and wrong, good and bad, acceptable and out-of-line. The key to judgement though is being willing to say why you hold the opinion you do, and making sure it’s based on some sort of knowledge, argument or experience (preferably all of the above). Even then though I accept that every so often people just need to say out-loud “screw you, I hate your guts”, “you’re fugly” or “your mother’s better in bed than your sister”. Because if we don’t let it out now and then it builds up into the self-denial and other-denial that leads to a very sad, very serious, and very boring world.

Even as I write this I know certain friends of mine will think it’s about them, it’s not! Honestly, just chill, this has nothing to do with you. Call off the attack dogs (who, I might say, are the angriest bitter little ass-hats I’ve ever had the pleasure of blocking comments from – and that feels so very good to be able to say). This post is 100% inspired from two SL fashion police blogs I was combing through today, SL Fashion Police, and What the Fug?. I found myself laughing and relaxing as I read through their comments and looked at the pictures. They don’t supply names, they’re just having fun (and every so often making some very accurate points about SL clothing and shape bloopers). They are actually the sort of useful blogs I’d send newbies to to get a good feel of what not to wear if they want to create a good first impression in people they meet. Are they harsh and cruel and pointlessly mean at times, hmmmm, maybe. But like I’ve been saying… aren’t we all..?

Virtually Valuable

While reading the comments on a friend’s blog post about Freebies, I came across the standard comment (and from a Second Life resident no less), which goes along the lines of “it’s all just play clothes on virtual dolls, why do you all give a crap?”. I was going to reply to it but realised what I had to say had wider application and goes to the heart of trying to understand why people bother with a virtual world at all. So it’s getting its very own blog post over here instead .

The first thing to realise is that that style of argument can apply to every single element of Second Life, “it’s just pixel pieces, why do you care that this sim is being destroyed..” “it’s just fake water, why does a view of it matter”, “it’s just toy bodies, why do you care who they have virtual sex with”, etc. So as Second Life residents we should always be suspect of this argument from anyone else who is a resident too – surely we know better than that by now. We might find it easier to defend why we value whichever part of Second Life we take part in, but struggle to appreciate someone else’s interest in something like Second Life fashion.

It doesn’t take a lot of reflection to put together the arguments though – the way we dress our avatars expresses our own style; some people write poems, some sing songs, some do pictures, others dress up. They are just all ways to say “this is me, this is what I am, this is how I feel”. Then there’s all the arguments about the fact that people make real money from virtual clothes, and spend real money on virtual clothes, there is livelihood at stake here and that is always going to be important to the people involved in it. Throw in the points about the art-form itself of creating virtual clothes – the precision and expertise involved – and all up it’s really not that hard to understand why some people care so damn much about it.

However, you don’t have to go through those sorts of in-depth or reasoned arguments if you don’t want to – because this whole discussion just emulates the exact same arguments we throw at each other in real life about real life activities. For example, I have no idea why so many of the men I know spend money and time following and caring about sports. I’ve heard their arguments and none have convinced me I should suddenly take an interest in it myself. You can push the examples to the edge of reason as well and try to appreciate the money and time people like MTG players put into a small pieces of cardboard that the rest of us would just throw out as rubbish, or stamps, or whatever – the examples are unlimited. All that matters though is that they do value those things – whether they can make you value them too or not is going to be irrelevant to their own desire and possible obsession over them.

To the same extent it becomes pointless to constantly ridicule people about the things they value – in any world. We all take joy from different things, it’s part of the beauty of the diversity of humanity, why would anyone want to destroy that, and make us all like the same things? What an incredibly boring world that would be.

There is a line to be drawn of course: If someone is spending time or money on something to an extent that they are endangering their own or their family’s lives, then we say enough is enough. But we call that an obsession, or an addiction, and we generally understand that just about any imaginable (legal) activity becomes dangerous at those extremes. However most people don’t live at the extremes of addiction and obsession, and the chances of you being able to figure out if they do or not from some brief blog comments they make, seems very low. So even with this line of concern there is little ground to dismiss what someone else values as “stupid” or “unreasonable”.

What is considered “valuable” changes from individual to individual. And even when two individuals value something equally, the reasons for them ascribing it that value are likely to vastly differ – whether those reasons are monetary gain from on-selling the item later, emotional ties, rarity, beauty, or historical connections. Some people will mount arguments for “objective value” – but that’s usually at the fringes of philosophical debate, where we try to make the argument that everyone should value life, or happiness or other things which are rarely on the market anyway. The ways in which we achieve happiness or our versions of the good life are reflected in the rest of the items and activities we try to surround ourselves with; trying to tell someone they are “wrong” for valuing stamps or sports or pixels when in fact they help that person achieve one of these higher goals (of lets say, happiness), is to miss the point entirely.

Within certain communites we can have meaningful discussions about value. For example in the Second Life fashion community there can be meaningful discussions about the value of a well-made dress with fantastic unique textures. But if you don’t value Second Life fashion at all, trying to jump into that discussion and tell them they’re all morons for thinking it matters who designed a dress or the details of the texture, is a waste of your time and a waste of theirs; go get involved with discussions about things you do actually care about, instead of focusing so much effort on bringing down what makes other people happy.

There are a lot of thoughts I’m trying to get out here, that require more space than a single post rightly allows. But the point is an important one: Why we value Second Life at all – why we value what we do there, why one person values clothes and the other values snail races – is as much a discussion as to why one person values collectible playing cards and another spends their time drooling over Ferraris. Just accept that what makes you happy might not make your neighbour happy, but that as long as you’re not addicted or obsessed to the point of destroying lives, just live and let live. You’re not going to convince me to stop valuing everything Joss Whedon creates, and I’m not going to convince you that following sport is pointless (even though it is :p ).