Shoes or Weapons - you decide

shoes or weapons - you decide
An interesting weekend: I helped two friends to upload their video to youtubehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTA4GPQpLq4
and joined 9 million other people in the world's most under-reported conflict - the burning crusade.

It strikes me how perfectly developments in biotechnology and information technology are matched, if Frances Fukuyama is to be believed ('Our Posthuman Future'). According to Fukuyama there are three classes of biotechnology development worthy of our consideration:1) the extension of human lifespan (and the ageing population generally)2) the development and legitimisation of psychoactive drugs (citing prozac and ritalin as examples)3) the dawning ability to genetically engineer (or selectively breed) offspring
- to what end?
Perhaps so that the distractions which our bodies present may be reduced to a bare minimum in the interests of preserving an uninterrupted informational existence: bodies which require little exercise, artificially enhanced concentration and satiety at the expence of reduced sexual appetite and creativity, and all of it spread more thinly over an extended lifespan. But only for the privileged few: Fukuyama's 'Brave New World' widens the gap between the genetic underclass condemned to slave away in the real world and an engineered ruling class, experiencing new degrees of freedom in an informational universe.
I read with interest that the BBC is to open a virtual world for children. I can say with some certainty what the appeal of this environment to many children will be: to be able to manipulate and experiment with one's appearance and explore the reactions of others - in short to develop and refine impression management skills. My elder daughter is a warcraft player and it continues to impress me how central the experience of varying the appearance of characters and selecting their clothing is. But there is an important additional step to the behaviour of the adult players (given that the average player is in their 30's) - the addition of status. Items of appearance are linked to status, and much time is spent acquiring items whose appearance denotes or confers status. This, of course, represents an androcentric bias - in contrast to the BBC's proposals which are predictably shy of permitting the kinds of dominance-oriented activity which have made other virtual worlds so successful. No money, no levels, no weapons. The future of this feminist utopia will be interesting, I think. I can only hope that the creator's of the BBC virtual world have stocked the virtual wardrobes sufficiently. Shoes may well be a deciding factor.
Curiously, this all too human motivation is also at the heart of the Wii design - over the past few months I would estimate that more time has been spent creating, modifying and observing player avatars than in actually playing the games themselves. What is gathering momentum is the tendency of people to identify with their online representation - surely the first step in mass migration - for millions of people the faint realisation that their online existence might be so much more 'liberating' than their physical one.
And this is the curiously predictable oversight of technologists in general - that they overlook the significance of what Fukuyama calls 'human nature' in their designs - that they rhythmically fail to anticipate the impact of instinct: in short that technology provides merely an extrapolation of precisely those actvities being pursued one hundred thousand years ago. Who would have thought, for example, that people would purchase phones with features they are unlikely ever to use - simply because they crave the status associated with the possession of a feature-rich device.
And this is precisely why virtual environments and technological change in general is fascinating - because it is so revealing of human nature. Through it we are able to conduct a kind of 'factor analysis' - spotting in sharp relief those invariants that go to make up the enduring features of our humanity amidst the fluid transitions in our environment. It reminds me of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiments of the 70s - in which the renowned psychologist recreated an experimental prison in the basement of Stanford University in the interests of studying the influence of changing roles (prisoner/guard) on human personality. What he discovered was so shocking, so unexpected, that he was forced to end the research prematurely: simply by shifting roles he exposed the dark mechanics of human nature - it's fierce focus on dominance and expediency and the sheer depth of ingroup and outgroup effects - but most of all the flimsy nature of socialisation itself. But I suppose I should have realised that in any case, having been at the BBC for a little while now ;o)