Hello World

Hello World

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Books (single author, editor, contributor)

  • 2013 Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace
  • 2012 In the Flesh: Twenty Writers Explore the Body
  • 2009 Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies
  • 2008 Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and the New Screen
  • 2004 Hello World: Travels in Virtuality
  • 2002 Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture
  • 2000 Inhuman Reflections: Rethinking the Limits of the Human
  • 1999 The Noon Quilt
  • 1998 Crossing The Border
  • 1995 Creative Writing : A Handbook for Workshop Leaders
  • 1994 Wild Women: Contemporary Short Stories by Women Celebrating Women
  • 1994 Water
  • 1992 Correspondence
  • 1990 Where No Man has Gone Before: Essays on Women and Science Fiction

Snippets from the past

  • 2012 Traces of the trAce Online Writing Centre 1995-2005 | Jacket2
  • 2005 trAces: A Commemoration of Ten Years of Artistic Innovation at trAce
  • 2005 trAce Online Writing Centre Archive
  • 2004 Sistema Purificacion
  • 2003 Spivak
  • 2002 Writing Machines by N.Katherine Hayles
  • 2002 Tools of the trade
  • 2002 Stephanie Strickland: Living in the Space between Print and Online
  • 2002 No visible means of support
  • 2002 A New Sensibility? The qualities of a new media writer
  • 2001 Interview by 3am Magazine
  • 2000 lux : notes for an electronic writing
  • 2000 Evolving Practice: writers working online with trAce
  • 2000 Correspondence @ Riding the Meridian
  • 2000 ::::::In Place of the Page::::::
  • 1999 Tremble
  • 1999 The [+]Net[+] of Desire
  • 1999 Noon Quilt
  • 1999 Interview by Full Circle
  • 1998 Sharing a common language online
  • 1998 Land: Textual MOO-based virtual landscapes
  • 1998 Imagining a stone: virtual landscapes
  • 1998 Ensemble Logic + Choragraphy
  • 1998 Creative interaction in cyberspace
  • 1997 Revolver


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    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material of whatever nature created by Sue Thomas and included in this weblog and any related pages, including the weblog's archives, is included in this License.

Can people let go of their fear long enough to experience the benefits of virtuality?

I recently discovered Terra Nova via the trackbacks on my visitor stats. It's an intriguing collaborative weblog about virtual worlds. Nathan Combs wrote this piece about my article on Walter Ong, and it was followed by a number of insightful comments.


Just to link them together, here is my response to Lisa Galarneau's comment:

Lisa, you wrote:

'Can people let go of their fear long enough to experience the benefits of virtuality? Can they even conceive that there might be benefits that they can't imagine?'

I think the second point is especially interesting, because on the whole the answer is probably no - they cannot conceive of benefits. However, they *can* conceive of a whole lot of terrors! Porn, theft, spam... these are the downsides that they can well imagine, and do. When someone is too terrified to use a chatroom, they're not likely to try a virtual world. I've found this frustrating and depressing, yet I suppose I have to concede that their fears do sometimes have a grain of validity, not because of the porn and spam etc, but because the experience can indeed play with your mind and it can be hard to cope with. I was a victim of this in the early days and I am sure many here have experienced being taken for a ride or hurt in some way in virtual environments.

In the end I decided it is about maturation and that in the process of learning to live online we go through stages of child, adolescent and adulthood. In that context, it is easier to imagine how one's 'inner child' might be attracted or repelled by an initial encounter with a virtual world. To go one step further, I think it's possible to skip the growing up part and jump straight into online life as an 'adult', abiding by the rules and protocols you have been given rather than learning them from experience, but sadly missing out on some of the intensities gathered along the way by those of us who learned by trial and error.

But, Lisa, I'm just an armchair psychologist too! Like you, I look forward to a more informed view. And I'm curious to know whether any work has been done on this, because I'm about to embark on some myself.

First posted at Terra Nova

Posted by Sue Thomas on Jan 07, 2005 at 09:02 AM in 10 Growing up | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Mappa Mundi

Page 70
Now we are so connected that we must re-conceptualise what we mean by physical space...

Mappa Mundi is a great site for exploring the new geographies of the internet. It aims to "examine information discovery on the Internet via an eclectic mix of ideas about technology, history, and the future of cyberspace." At present it is being maintained in an archival format by Media.org. Check out the explanation of the Mappa Mundi logo describing how the three continents are replaced with the fundamental elements of cyberspace: red, green and blue. Perhaps this connects with Simon's notion of a Mandala?
mappa_mundi.jpg

Posted by Sue Thomas on Mar 15, 2004 at 11:32 PM in 10 Growing up | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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10 Growing up

Page 75
Most of us pass through a number of developmental stages on the web although of course not everyone passes through all of them. Many people never use chat, for example, and hardly anyone knows what a MOO is, let alone spends time in one. Most of us don’t have the capacity to download the faster and fancier websites, and people browsing from behind a firewall are excluded from a wide range of activities, especially live communications and sometimes downloading files and software too. Movies and sound are beyond the reach of much of the connected world, though the situation is improving fast as bandwidth increases and more people get broadband connections. But since a lot of us use the web in the office, where audio is considered antisocial, we often browse with our speakers turned off, unaware of a whole world of sound effects, music and voices.

But pretty well all of us who are on the web use email. For many of us, email IS the web. In the words of those who know, it is the killer app. So for the Child taking their first baby steps, an email account is imperative. And since we are looking to the future, let us make this one a spivak child, with spivak pronouns to play with

Developmental Profile: Stage 1 Child
Has recently gained access to the web and obtained an email address. Generally enthusiastic but clumsy and doesn’t quite ‘get it’ yet. Has only had time to discover 1% of the features available, so operates in blissful ignorance. Often fails to read email attachments as e does not know that they exist, let alone how to open them. Generally slow to respond to email because e seldom logs on and also because e has not yet realised that email is a two-way medium and senders usually expect a reply. New users often find it hard to grasp that email should be taken as seriously as snailmail or phonecalls. Likely to make mistakes in the setup and operation of eir computer due to simply not being aware of its potential and abilities. Often believes the machine is broken when it simply needs preferences altering. Gets very frustrated and blames the machine, the internet, eir ISP, and the designers of sites e cannot access.

Worried about:
doing it right; being swamped by email and attacked by viruses and hackers; getting addicted; spending too much money; having cash fraudulently drawn from eir bank account; being exposed to pornography.

Excited about:
access to information; connecting with long lost friends and relatives; being exposed to pornography.


Developmental Profile: Stage 2 Naïve Adolescent
Now e is engaging closely with people online via email, chat or discussion boards. Has made several very close friends and sensed the powerful intimacy online can engender. The desire to connect may have inspired em to create eir own homepage containing personal information and perhaps even a photograph. Doing this has increased eir webskills and e now knows something about writing HTML, creating digital images with a camera or a scanner, and uploading them to the web. Alternatively, e may have sent this material to one of eir new online friends and they have created the page. E now has eir own url, which e releases perhaps to the world or perhaps just to trusted friends. E now sleeps less and stays up late at night, chatting with people in other parts of the world. E always knows what time it is in New York and Sydney. Some relationships have developed into sending letters and parcels by snailmail; talking on the phone; arranging fleshmeets. Some may have moved into online sex, a keyboard variation of phone sex which is at its most effective for the highly ambidextrous. During this time it is likely that e will experiment with groups outside eir usual way of life, including fringe religious, spiritual and political organisations. This stage involves all or any of: euphoria; sex; intensity; fascination; speed; timezones; ecstasy; gender; joy; intellect; community; laughter; mind-expansion; fun; and learning.

Worried about:
the amount of time e is now spending online; the vast amount of disk-space taken up with emails and logs of online encounters; existing relationships with family and friends, which have taken a nose-dive since e met eir online friends; minutiae of squabbles and intimacies in the online world ranging from small disagreements to major betrayals.

Excited about:
the intensity of online; the new facets of emself now being released show that what were previously only dreams of who e might be are becoming closer to reality; e is discovering a new sexuality / playfulness / level of friendship; the craft of making web-pages and other forms of programming may be capturing eir imagination – e is acquiring a whole new set of technical skills and fluencies.

Developmental Profile: Stage 3 Hurt Adolescent
Hurt and be hurt. IRL adolescents push the boundaries and the result can be car-smashes; drug overdoses; religious and political manias; sports accidents; and suicidal depressions. The equivalents for net adolescents (who can be of any physical age) include being both the victims and the perpetrators of various destructive behaviours: damaging acts of psychological manipulation fuelled by the euphoria of anonymity; the results of uncontrolled behaviour caused by the freedom from RL repression; criminal acts including fraud and abuse, and of course the famous net-stalking which in the early days of the web had everyone in a panic. These days it is mentioned less frequently, though it still continues in both physical and psychological behaviour.

Worried about:
whether e can ever trust anyone again; whether there is some fatal flaw in eir psychological makeup which creates a vulnerability to abuse (or a desire to abuse); the damage e may have caused to friends and family due to eir immersion in web-life

Excited about:
restoring and recovering aspects of physical life which have been ignored; revisiting offline relationships; finding a way to keep the best parts of net-life and get rid of the rest.


Developmental Profile: Stage 4 Adult
Having passed through the passions of net-adolescence and been burned by the wilder edges of the web, e now reaches a level of emotional intelligence wherein e moves through the internet with knowledge and a fluency which could only be reached after a period of learning and development. But some users, especially those who choose never to experiment, will, just as in Real Life, pass from childhood to adulthood and never experience the trials and tribulations of net-adolescence. And as in real life, this is a sad state of affairs, because it means they move through the web with no experiential understanding of its full potential. They may see the logic of it, and know a great deal about it, but if they have never properly lived there they are certainly missing out. The adult on the web either knows how to handle the whole environment or has made decisions to operate in a limited and known safe area. The latter will always be vulnerable to error or attack, but then real life is the same. The adult worries much less; is cautious, sensible and knows how to protect emself and eir system from attack and error. Life may never again be the roller coaster it was for the wet-behind-the-ears naïve adolescent but this is now familiar and well-trodden terrain. Keep to the well-lit areas, don’t speak to strangers, and you’ll be just fine : )

Is there a stage beyond this? I suspect there is but few of us have reached it yet, although many aspire to do so. Perhaps it is the post-human, where flesh and information blend into a single/multiple corpus, a new conception of the body and machine, a new sense of self. Whatever it is, I don’t think it will be shiny and silver, but more probably oily, smelly, and tactile

Posted by Sue Thomas on Mar 03, 2004 at 02:56 PM in 10 Growing up | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

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Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace

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  • 01 Imagining (5)
  • 02 Hello World (3)
  • 03 Shapes (4)
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