Reality has changed! Extended Reality includes mixing physical world and virtual world spaces. For the celebration of Second Life’s 17th Birthday Party, my friend and colleague Renne Brock built a giant Polaroid Camera set up on an oversized desk for avatars to tour, sit, and share memories of meeting both physically and virtually. Playing with the “size” of our world is an interesting phenomenon.
SLB17 by Renne Brock of Nonprofit Commons
My avatar looks tiny sitting on the yellow beanbag. The memory of my librarian colleagues meeting in San Francisco at a conference can be viewed on the Polaroid picture. Many other “real world” meetups were shared as the pictures scrolled by on the giant desk.
Meeting folks in the “real world” after working together virtually is always a pleasure, yet virtual environments like Second Life ARE real. The Assistant Director of the Community Virtual Library (center of photo) has worked with me on numerous projects on a plethora of virtual platforms: Skype, Google Hangouts, Discord, Zoom, SineSpace, Virbella, AltspaceVR, Kitely, Second Life, Mozilla Hubs and more!
The “X” in XR can stand for any type of reality: AR (augmented), VR (virtual), or MR (mixed). Notice the little colored buttons on the desk? Renne gives out a button each time she meets a colleague in the physical world. I have quite a collection of them. Yes…reality has changed for sure!
Da-ding, Da-ding! Is that your phone notification of something incoming? Hadn’t you better check it?
Over the past few years, as more people utilize smart phones for instant access to information and communication, I keep running into the same concerns. Time and time again, a new smart phone owner will tell me “It has changed my life!” Then, I observe them exit our physical reality to enter the “other places” that await us on mobile devices: news sites, social media, photos, memes, content creation tools, curation applications and innovation entertainment activities- just to name a few.
We all see it everywhere we look….people staring into screens. Yet, what do we reach for the moment we awaken each day? Our phones. How do we feel when we forget our phone at home? I have heard people say they feel everything from vulnerability to actual fear.
Just where IS everyone heading? I took this picture on the bus because everyone near me was on a mobile device. Nobody was “on the bus” with me!
Eric Pickersgill, an artist who photographs digital culture, shares some haunting images at Removed. We all see people “removed from our world” every day. I have heard jokes about the zombies around us- people who are not really with us.
My daughter, a tech savvy creative and intelligent young woman, recently suggested I write a blog post with tips on balancing physical and virtual life! She had not heard of FOMO and realized she had personally felt that sensation (FOMO= fear of missing out) that her phone was beckoning her to a world beyond….a world where important things were happening. The world beyond our physical surroundings, on our digital devices, takes us to a place where boredom no longer exists and where we can be both active and passive with no rules or constrictions. Yet, deep in our souls, we feel a slight discomfort (if not horror) knowing that we can never master keeping up with the incoming and never really exit the small reality of our tiny individual life.
Which leads me to…
BALANCE TIP #1 Intentional Disconnection Time
Find a time to leave your device and do not touch it! Schedule yourself a PHYSICAL WORLD ONLY time, if only an hour a day. During that time, focus on physical reality: deep breaths, trees, textures, hot tea, smiles, and your five senses.
You could add prayer, yoga, meditation, or a walk outdoors, or even housework! But, the idea here is to be consciously disconnected. While connecting with others across distance is an amazing new opportunity, it can overtake and overwhelm us unless we can find a balance between the physical and the virtual world.
Contemplate your disconnection time. This may seem too obvious or too easy. But it really isn’t when you think about it. Our phones are always with us and it takes intentional effort to disconnect for a period of time. More tips to come!
I just finished reading Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation which was chock full of truisms and presents a challenge to all of us to consider how we communicate. She makes a case for setting limits on technology tools, particularly our phones, and taking a good look at the value and importance of real voices and human eye contact in face to face conversation. Turkle believes students today lack empathy for others because our constant connectivity in digital spaces reduces friendship to a “performance” rather than a relationship.
In addition to the preference of texting over talking and the performance of “an edited life” on social media, young people are bombarded by information all around them and have grown up in a state of distraction. Television increasingly brings us BREAKING NEWS with a constant crawl on non-related topics scrolling across the screen and dramatic special effects hyping what is suppose to inform us.
Breaking News
Not only are we now comfortable with constant distraction, we consider nonstop interruption a normal state of affairs as our devices ding and beep in our pockets. Turkle says, “We forget how unusual this has become, that many young people are growing up without ever having experienced unbroken conversations either at the dinner table or when they take a walk with parents or friends. For them, phones have always come along” p. 16.
Are you concerned about the effects of mobile devices and where global digital participatory culture is heading? Do you feel like you have a handle on balancing your “digital double” (Turkle’s term for our online selves)?
The ideas in Turkle’s latest book are worthy of our attention. Stay tuned for part two and more discussion on this critical topic. Photos from https://www.flickr.com/photos/rubbercat/208330144/in/photostream/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/clanlife/6369791755
I keep running into the term post-modernism and I think it applies to us all. Life as a 21st century educator (building a PLN, participating in Web 2.0, and constantly striving toward best practices of learning in global participatory digital culture) is a fascinating, yet paradoxical adventure. We now live in an era of metaliteracy, metadata, and perhaps “metalife”. We no longer plant, harvest, and cook our food, like The Little Red Hen, because we enjoy our modern conveniences. Yet, we are busier than ever “growing” our networks and “creating/curating” our content.
What powerful tools we have to connect on a global scale! I have colleagues in Greece, Australia, Great Britain and all over the globe. Some have actual met me physically and some have not. Does it matter? In a long ago era (think prior to the Internet), it mattered. To meet someone meant to look into their eyes, to see the lines of age and experience or the wide-eyed innocence of youth. That meeting was the opportunity to get a sense of one’s physical presence. But today, perhaps the digital presence supercedes the physical one. As digital devices have become top priority for communication, our metaselves have become “us”. I don’t mean to sound like a dark futurist or a stuffy academic philosopher. Maybe I am just a rambling librarian who wants to hang onto something physical like a book (and you can read tons of articles about why you would want to! Ebooks are never really owned- only licensed temporarily).
What is interesting is how we pick and choose our personal/professional learning networks (or our online communities for those outside of education) as though we are critically evaluating people as data. A century ago, the number of people we encountered, whether brilliant, annoying, or comical, was limited. Today, we have a flood of information and a flood participants in our incoming stream of networked applications. Today, we can not only curate and critically evaluate information topics, we can curate the people who share the content.
I do think we need to remember one thing. People are more important than data. Behind these words, your words, your online curation, your tweets, and behind every keyboard- is a person. A living person is more than algorithms of interests, more than big data. Maybe, if I take a break and breathe deeply, I will allow serendipity to occur and life to be simply lived. To be alive is miraculous and the funny thing is… just when I think I am grasping the concept of post-modernism- I learn that post-modernism is over. We are entering post– post-modernism. That doesn’t scare me. I am getting used to not understanding life.
(Note 2020: I revisit my blog as I migrate to a new site and discover the path I took on my journey from postmodernism to metamodernism.)
What triggers the human brain to reminisce about our past experiences in life? Smells, I am told, are critical to our memories. But, this week, for the first time, I ran across an old machinima that I shot in 2008 and (believe it or not) I found myself virtually reminiscing. Physical space, such as our houses or the streets and shady parks we remember from our youth, cause us to recall personal memories.
Perhaps I am one of the first to discover a personal “pang” of reminiscence in a virtual world. The spaces we live in are moving from physical to virtual. Whether or not we have an avatar is of little consequence.
Note (2020): With BlipTV gone away… I have lost many of my early machinima videos. But I remember the places.
Much of my blog has documented my virtual world experiences. Currently, as I explore new augmented reality apps and experience collaboration through the popular trend of MOOCs, I believe the future holds a combination of physical, virtual , and augmented experiences for learning, shopping, playing, and enjoying our lives.
Learning
I finished my role in the Summer in Berlin virtual world library exhibit with live tours. Dressed in clothes from the 1920s, I joined others from around the world to experience Berlin and shot a short machinima (below). No doubt students will explore history through virtual experience in the future, but a shared physical space will still be of great value. Any space (physical or virtual) can be misused or taken for granted. Appreciation of excellence in our learning experiences requires deep thinking and sharing with others in any space or format.
MOOCs
Massive Open Online Courses are the buzz on twitter among the edu crowd. I joined MOOC MOOC but had very little time to participate during back-to-school week. Then, I discovered an interesting mooc for younger students called the Anne Frank Mooc. The leader of the Virtual Pioneers in Second Life is a technology educator who specializes in historical immersive learning environments. Our paths have crossed numerous times at virtual world events.
MOOCs give participants an opportunity to create learning experiences on any topic across distance, much like virtual worlds (but without the high learning curve). Comparing a MOOC experience with immersive learning in virtual worlds will be interesting. I took these Animoto photos during “office hours” in the MOOC and I plan to take some machinima shots when the MOOC participants enter the Anne Frank museum virtually.
Shopping
I received an IKEA catalog in the mail this week which allows you to see furniture on your digital device through augmented reality. Obviously, augmented reality could be cost effective for companies selling products at some point in the future. For now, companies may have to invest in augmented reality applications, print materials, online shopping options, as well as physical outlets. Tough times for marketing!
Playing I downloaded Minecraft, just to see what all the fuss was about! My students just love the game and I was curious about why chopping the ground to build out of square blocks could be so exciting. I discovered that there is pleasure in working hard to create something unique. A colleague gave me a new word for it– “playbor”! As our personal and professional lives become less separated and our home and work spaces overlap, so does our time spent on leisure activities. Playbor is a portmanteau combining play and labor.
Whew! This is a rambling post but the idea that ties it together is life experience. We learn through living— through experiences with others. That is how it has always been with human beings. I keep hearing about the exponential growth of changes due to technology. One thing has not changed. We are human beings. What a wonder….to experience.
