M is for Myg

Are you following Tateru Nino’s series over at the Second Life Insider, “Who are we?” Well, if you’re not I think you should.

She’s trying to get a handle on all of us, in a general sense, by asking a bunch of us about our Second Lives. Yesterday she was looking for someone to profile and I, being the shy recluse that I am, shot her an IM *and* a twitter volunteering myself for duty.

I was damned lucky, and honored quite frankly, that she picked me. You can hear what I had to say over at Second Life Insider.

I don’t want to embarrass her, but Tateru is one of my absolute favorite bloggers out there. You can read her at Second Life Insider, New Word Notes, and on her own blog Dwell on it. She covers all kinds of Second Life issues, from business to stats to politics to social issues to shopping to, garsh, pretty much everything. Her posts are always clear, insightful and ring with a sincerity that’s hard to find anywhere on the web. And you know what else? She’s nice. Unlike, well, some other bloggers who think they’re all badass, but anyway I digress and my sentences runneth on.

So after doing this little interview with Tateru, I sat down and asked myself, Who the fuck am I? (And Esteban, I couldn’t help but think of you with this, especially after unveiling your latest hypothesis.)

See, when I first rezzed 225 days ago there were real clear differences between me and that biologically based thing that I believed created me. I was clearly not her. I did things she would never do, albeit I did them as pixels and cognitions and perhaps not flesh acting in a physical reality. I really knew the difference then, but hell, there were moments when I truly didn’t feel the difference and I think that’s just how the brain is. We don’t always feel the difference between the virtual and the so-called real.

Know how when you see a movie, and it’s a really good drama and you tear up or maybe full on cry? Or a horror flick where you can feel your heart rate increasing, the hair on your arms standing?

Our minds don’t always know what’s real and what isn’t. Hence, I imagine, the argument posed by plenty that “real life” should be called “first life” since there’s a lot of reality to Second Life. And there’s truth to that statement, but I don’t feel that way, and I am digressing again.

After talking with Tateru and asking myself about my identity, Myg vs. the human who drives her, I came to a bit of an unsettling realization. And it was this.

The human who drives me (me as in Myg) is a career woman who spends much of her time–far too much of it–in character, as it were. She’s a professional who is overworked and cuts loose too little. So much of her time is spent not being fully who she is, because when she is at work, she is in a somewhat narrowly defined role. And when you spend a lot of time doing that, it’s hard to turn it off.

Me, on the other hand, the Myg who hangs out in Topgol, argues relentlessly with campers and casino owners and rude passersby, curses, spits, shoots, hooks up and occasionally shows her ass by the embarrassing complications her behaviors get her into, is actually a lot more human than that poor overworked human who created the account with Linden Lab.

So who am I? I’m Myg, and if you want to know the truth, I’m not the exact same as the human, some virtual replica just representin’ but my soul is sort of entwined, my thoughts are hers and some of my behaviors might be if she figured out that she doesn’t have to be so fucking careful all the time.

Of course, that whole kicking campers in the head probably would have landed her some time in a cell had it happened in Vegas, or at best a hefty lawsuit. But that, in my opinion, is what the virtual world is really good at. Acting out in ways here so that our human counterparts don’t do it and wind up in jail.

So thanks, Tateru, for provoking such thoughts.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 10:04 am and is filed under Second Life.