Does your VW give you the feeling of place?

The state humanities council are exploring "making sense of place" at our conference this year.

Do you feel a sense of place in your vw as a whole, or in particular parts of it? Does that sense of place have more to do with the community sharing the experience, or the mirroring of familiar terrestrial characteristics. Have you migrated to this place, is it transitional or ephemeral? If you feel a sense of place, does this place have a spirit or soul?

In virtual worlds I am familiar with second life only. I am not sure I feel it is a place, as a whole, anymore than I feel the internet's repository of websites is a place. But I do have a tangible feeling about certain areas in sl. There are many places I feel like a tourist, but there are places I return to, watch their growth and development and in some cases disappearance. The places I feel most certain about are ones I have built, or my friends have built, and have repeated interactions in the space. I have a friend who has built several spaces with a similar feeling and sense of self invested. I feel they are the same place, on different sims and at different times, but very much associated with personality and mission. I have a sense of place at my gallery, that it is connected with where it is, its odd shape very much part of the original size of parcel, that it has watched the comings and goings of waves of change, and this has contributed to my sense of it belonging to that specific area. I do feel if I moved, it would be a different place.

Are there virtual places that are more authentic than terrestrial places?

10 Comments

Comment by Jack Ryker on October 16, 2007 at 6:37pm: pondering.....

Comment by Sophrosyne Stenvaag on October 17, 2007 at 6:40pm: Beth:

This is a wonderful topic - thank you for starting the thread!

In response to wondering whether SL can have a sense of place overall, two friends of mine are on a project to hike the length of the mainland and blog their travels: http://argent_bury.livejournal.com

I'm part of a project to experiment with creating community and place in SL. We'll be launching within a month, and we'd be happy to share our details with you.

Here's a resource we found that's shaping how we think of place and community: What is Placemaking?, and particularly Eleven Principles.

I think there definitely can be digital places that are more authentic than terrestrial ones. A more interesting question, coming from your observations is, can there be a more authentic digital place that's the product of community iteration, rather than static individual vision? That's one question we hope to answer...

Comment by Prokofy on October 17, 2007 at 9:28pm: Yes.

Comment by Sophrosyne Stenvaag on October 17, 2007 at 10:30pm: Kate, you're welcome! I hope you find them useful!

Comment by beth felice on October 18, 2007 at 7:57am: Oh I so love this idea of hiking through mainland. Such an interesting project and I am so grateful to be able to follow along!
I've been so interested this past week going through sl and thinking about this idea of place. When the building in sl is a literal representation of a terrestrial place, I get such mixed feelings. Are the evocations from the memories of the terrestrial place, if I know the place do I feel now more connected to the sl representation, or if I don't know the place from being there and having my own memories and experiences there, do I add this to the photos I have seen and words I have read about the place, and does it inform that version in my mind to any greater extent?
Are you familiar with one of City Lore's projects, Place matters? These are places that hold memories and anchor traditions for individuals and communities, and that help tell the history of the city as a whole.
If the objects around the memory are temporal, even fleeting (or ubiquitous big box and strip mall suburban america) we have to shift our anchor points.
So then, how much of an exercise is this creation of representative buildings in sl. Does it add anything to the experience either of the memory of place, or the sense of sl place?
It seems a more engaging approach might be to be able to augment the experience of the rl place. Right now I see a lot of single point of view, and rather polemic approaches to sl representations of political, relgious, or current event issues.
But I was thinking about the recent events at the Jena High School. And how as a person not there, and not connected, I had to keep searching for different parts of the story. How there are conflicting interpretations of the same events based on the culture and history of the point of view. It seems like such a natural environment, sl, to explore these different point of view, these different interpretations of the story. From beyond we see the story in the aggregate, but many of the voices of the story use those elements in different proportions.

Comment by Sophrosyne Stenvaag on October 26, 2007 at 1:13pm: Beth - I'm sorry for my delay in getting back to you - I've been meaning to reply for ages!

If you're not familiar with the Metaverse Roadmap, you may want to take a look at it. It breaks the Metaverse, or whatever you like calling 3D web technologies, into 4 quadrants.

One is an overlay of data onto the atomic world - think of Google Earth on steroids. One use now is to track buses in real time - but there's talk of building data into places, so that with a set of goggles or some such, you could look at a historical building, call up curatorial information, check its power consumption, find literature mentions, and so on. The implications for creating place in the atomic world are huge.

The diagonally opposite quadrant are self-generating synthetic worlds like SL. There we get to the fascinating questions you started us off with: how is a sense of place created and maintained? Is the mechanism the same as in the atomic world? Do references to the atomic within the digital help create place, or are they inauthentic?

Incredibly fascinating stuff, and I'd love to talk more about this with you! Please feel free to respond here, or in world, or to email me at sophrosyne dot stenvaag at gmail dot com!

Comment by Jack Ryker on October 26, 2007 at 2:43pm: Fascinating! What are the other two quadrants?

Comment by Sophrosyne Stenvaag on October 26, 2007 at 4:05pm: ah - lifeblogging, and laboratory worlds - synthetic worlds created just for experimental purposes.

My last post ate the URL: http://metaverseroadmap.org/

Comment by Jack Ryker on October 26, 2007 at 7:30pm: okay, I've pondered enough. I feel
that when a person enters a 3d world,
he is immersed in another space.
However, the immersion is not complete
until it is Multi-User. The fact
that a space is shared, is what makes
it alive and real, to me.

Funny thing is I'm not a big chatter,
but I enjoy the fact that a space
is accessible by people. I'm
already fascinated as long as someone
is sharing the space.

Though compared toreal life the information on display
is minimal, (sense information) nonetheless
the basic building blocks(3d based graphics and audio)
is enough to qualify it as a World.

Comment by beth felice on November 2, 2007 at 5:45pm: thank you for your comments. sophrosyne, i am working on understanding the metaverse roadmap--I need to spend a little more time, but then would like to discuss. On another note, d you have any kind of schedule of upcoming saturday salon schedules?

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