A question of skin...

A question of skin...
Over the weekend I reached level 70. Ding. The sense of achievement is also accompanied by a sense of relief. Some of you may be wondering just how much of one's time one needs to invest in order to reach level 70, but the likelihood is that most of you are not. Fortunatley for the curious few, Warcraft tracks this information: 30 days (720 hours). This is roughly equivalent to a full-time job for a five month period. Alternatively, for a few hundred pounds, you could pay someone from a developing country to do it for you (the proper expression is 'power levelling service').

I have attended a couple of conferences recently, speaking at some. Conferences attendees are mostly older people and, predictably, they just don't get it. 'Dogs bark at what they don't understand' Jaques Derrida famously remarked in response to his critics - and there is certainly lots of barking at such events. Rationalisations range in sophistication from the bald outburst that information technology is little more than a passing fad, to the lengthy piece penned by Jenny Diski in which she concludes that 'second life' is little more than a pale imitation of the real thing, for example.

My daughter, who is twelve, did not want to go with us on the walk around the lake, even though I promised it would take no longer than half an hour. She was busy - very busy. She divided her time roughly between three activities, each more deeply social in nature than anything pre-dating information technology: she played warcraft, she used MSN and Bebo, and she created two more 'skins' for her web-page. In the latter case, she had some fairly ambitious ideas so with a little help from me she learned to use photoshop. Each of these activities boils down to the same thing: extended experimentation with self-presentation, but in a world which has many more degrees of freedom. In Warcraft she spends much of her time 'sculpting' - creating, skinning and perfecting characters, then interacting with others - a kind of role-play or iterative experimentation if you like. Likewise with MSN and Bebo the goal is to make and remake one's self-image, forever developing forwards, social refencing violently: cutting, pasting, linking, embedding.
And so it is that the technological self is cut, pasted, linked and embedded - just as before but so, so much more.

And this is the crux, I suppose - as Deleuze and Guattari point out: qualitative diffences are spawned by quantitative differences - the morphogenesis of the human body begins with a few simple chemical gradients - differences in 'intensity'. So whilst it is true (as Diski and others are so quick to point out) that the online world often merely extends the same activity to be found in the offline world - the difference in intensity is precisely what is significant, because that is all that ever is. That is all that is needed for morphogenesis.

Another tack: Jenny makes much of the 'pink economy' - in second life she is approached by characters who offer to remove their clothing in exchange for 'credits'. How damnable. News recently reported on the scandal of teenagers, using facebook and web-cams to make money in exchange for indecent exposure - undoubtedly a disturbing thing. But what of the comparison between the two cases? What of virtual selves - is it all a question of skin? Who are these strippers in sexual life? Ageing ex-miners? Teenagers? Grandmothers at a loose end? Inhabitants of the third world, eeking out a living? Is it a good thing or a bad thing that in second life nobody cares what you really look like?

Another tack: why did facebook explode, I wonder? A large number of people who I haven't spoken to in years - school chums, ex-girlfriends, colleagues - are now brutally resurrected, plugged back into my ever-extending social map. There is an ominous feeling - a presentiment - it's like watching someone run thousands of cables through your home as you sit watching TV, connecting every device to each other, then running the cables through to your neighbours. You just can't help wondering what will happen when it's all re-wired.
Another tack: whilst the BBC's approach to diversity is laudably progressive, the general attitude mirrors that in most white liberal organisations, roughly 'if you're black we'll cut you some slack'. Neurological research, on the other hand, suggests that one individual's brain differs dramatically from the next - overall by as much as 40%. In other words, we inhabit an offline world which tends to make a big deal out of superficial differences and suppresses some very dramatic differences. The offline world tells us that we are either more different or more similar than we actually are, based on our superficial features. Is it all a question of skin?