Autoethnography

Here is the autoethography that I wrote for class some time ago. I decided to post it since I will be now conducting be engaging in more focused autoethnographic research in the coming weeks (explanation to come).

It is kind of cheesy. I am not sure why that is. I am also not sure if this piece of writing qualifies as an autoethnography. And the ending doesn’t make sense. It did when I wrote it at 5:00 am. Oh well.

Oct. 11/2007
The Second Time Around

I am twenty-four years old but I was reborn three weeks and two days ago. My rebirth was not of the spiritual sort; I did not find Jesus, though that would be an interesting story. I did not really find anything. I was simply born for the second time in Second Life. This is my life story.

MISSING-BODIMENT
I descended from the material womb that is real life and was virtually reborn as an avatar named Loran Sirbu. Unlike my real birth, I did have some say in my arrival into the virtual world. For one thing, I was able to choose my name. After some consideration, my first decision was to make up a name that would be gender-neutral and I wanted my last name to be somewhat ethnically vague. And so I arrived at the name Loran Sirbu. I have no idea how I came up with Loran (pronounced low-ran) but that is what felt right at the time. My desire for gender ambiguity stemmed from an initial curiosity about the possibility of gender fluidity in Second Life and of embodying a gender other than that differs from one’s real life gender. I have yet to explore that. As of now I have always been female and always tried to make myself somewhat attractive by conventional standards.
Before continuing with my life story, I feel the need to confess something. I am, or was rather, physically disabled. Let us, for a moment, consider my laptop to be my body in the context of SL. (Momentarily because the notions of body and embodiment are complex in SL and I am reluctant to fully accept my own analogy). The genetic makeup of my computer impaired my ability to function relative to the standards of the group. For quite some time, I refused to accept my “nature,” I blamed the slow performance, constant lagging, freezing and ensuing frustration that I experienced on the program itself. “But I have a MacBook Pro!” I would say to myself, thinking that Pro was synonymous with fast, yet oblivious to the fact that my Pro had only 512 MB of memory. Yet stubbornness and ignorance aside, this technological disability had physical and psychological effects.
(“And laziness aside,” we might add. Some readers might be thinking that I could have easily used any one of the high-powered computers provided by my educational institution. And perhaps you are also thinking that this preventability not only undermines my analogy but makes it offensive and banal. I accept that.)

Navigating SL was difficult: move arrows and walk three steps…ten-second lag. An avatar strikes up a conversation (“hi. I’m new here”)…fifteen-second pause…my response (“me too”). Try to take off the rabbit hat that I now hate after thinking it was funny a few days ago …twenty-seconds. The spinning rainbow ball that might provoke a toddler to giggle and clap in delight actually infuriated me. It caused me to react with angry gesticulations and curse words. Impatient as this may seem, the time lapse between the mental synapse that willed my finger to click the mouse and the resulting computed action, resulted in the feeling of having no control over my physical actions in a way that I had never experienced. In a “field note” which I blogged directly after an SL visit, I tried to articulate the experience into words:
I must say, there were many moments when I was overcome with sheer technological frustration. Not only was my computer–a MacBook Pro–lagging quite a bit, I often found myself in ‘mouse mode’ unable to locate where my avatar even was. This feeling is very hard to explain but imagine those nightmares where you are unable to control your surroundings and the movement of your body… [emphasis added].
This attempt at capturing my feeling was mediocre at best, but perhaps exemplifies language’s inability to fully speak about embodied experience (and perhaps my own inabilities as a writer. Clearly, this description violates the cardinal rule of creative writing: “show don’t tell.”)

Despite my never-ending frustration, I stopped writing about it. Not only was the act of expression difficult, but the prospect of filling my blog with musings about computer lag and my hatred thereof provoked anxiety. I did not want to come across as whiny or trite. (“This is a graduate level class. I have to discuss serious matters like embodiment and identity, not technical woes.”) Yet in hindsight, and probably at the time, my virtual disability had an even greater effect. Second Life became a chore, something that I had to do but wanted to avoid at all costs. And so I treated it as such and did other things instead, made up excuses, or could not “find the time.” When I did go on, I would either walk around aimlessly or occupy my time by changing my appearance, carefully fine-tuning the length of my side fringe. (I always spent the most time on my hair for some reason, despite the fact that I do not consider myself hair-obsessed in real life.) Because of this artful dodging, I must now confess, I am not the experienced avatar that I should probably be in order write an autoethnography. But quantity does not necessarily affect quality. This is, after all, a qualitative analysis.

FINDING-EMBODIMENT
Today, the UPS worker delivered my liberation. The cure for my impairment arrived in a cardboard box. Until today, my interest in SL was only theoretical, but two Gigabytes of RAM would transform me into a true participant. The gigabyte was the symbol of virtual potential, of my new mode of embodiment. Sure I spent over an hour struggling with a miniature screwdriver in order to install the RAM, only to then spend another hour on the phone with Rodney, the Apple Care technician who assisted me after my computer mysteriously ceased to work. But no one said liberation is easy. Liberation is hard work; it takes faith in the face of adversity. I didn’t make it on to Second Life until the evening. I crossed my fingers as I clicked on the ‘connect’ button but quickly uncrossed them when I entered because I need them to move in what was now SL-on-speed compared to what it was. The material effects of this change were obvious. No longer would I avoid conversation with other avatars for fear that my computer would freeze at any moment. No longer would I walk around feeling lonely because of that. The rainbow ball became a thing of my past. I could actually walk around without looking like a squirrel in slow motion. I chose to begin this narrative with my being born into SL with a disabled body because of my newfound appreciation of the mechanical details that other avatars take for granted. I felt the same as I had when I was finally able to move my elbows again after having fractured them. The feelings were a gratitude and wonder at my own embodiment: my ability to feed myself, to extend my arm without excruciating pain, to do things on my own.
(I feel the need to acknowledge the inherent pro-consumerist stance that might come across in my equating a consumer good, technology or not, to an emancipatory symbol. I will leave that up to the reader. Perhaps it is better to discuss Marxist implications by looking at how lack of access to technology effectively renders individuals disabled, or invisible, in Second Life and therefore hinders its truly democratic potential.)

This is not to say that my initial encounter with SL was not one of bewilderment. Flying, for example, was and continues to be a surreal experience. It acts out our collective fantasy of flying, or being able to transcend the constraints of the human body (as does SL more generally). Wasn’t that the one of the joys of Peter Pan? I used to delight in the prospect that thinking “lovely thoughts” could enable flight. When our class met on SL we flew as a group and this excited me even more. We were like Peter, Wendy, Michael, John and Tinkerbell. But instead of flying to Never Never Land, we were flying to a tattoo parlor in Venice Beach. Peter Pan and Second Life have another commonality in their responses to our cultural fantasy of immortality. Avatars do not physically reflect their age. Furthermore, it seems difficult to discern people’s RL ages from their virtual personalities. Just this evening I was speaking to a woman who I will mention later. I first thought she was in her twenties but realized that I was mistaken when she told me that she has been married for eighteen years.

With my new technical capacity, I felt like I could do anything, go anywhere, talk to anyone. But where was I to go? I checked to see if any of my classmate’s avatars were online but none were. What would I do in real life in this situation, say if I had just moved to a new city and knew no one but wanted to go out? I decided to search for something going on, search being the SL equivalent to Time Out as an up-to-date directory of the who, what, and where of a city. I then narrowed the activity down to live music. I had read about this phenomenon of real live musicians streaming their music in real time in virtual music venues, but wanted to experience it first hand. I teleported (another feature of SL that transcends the limits of the human body) to a venue called “The Lounge” and it was completely desolate. I searched again and saw a listing for a place called “Pannies & Rosedrop Media Circus.” Sold. When I arrived I was pleasantly surprised to find a small crowd of avatars dancing. The musician, Randy, was playing acoustic guitar and had a blues-y sound. This was certainly not the kind of music, nor the kind of place that I would find myself in real life (nor would I wear a tutu). But I was in no position to be choosy. There were people there and that is what I was really searching for. I wanted to have a meaningful conversation with someone. My previous conversations in SL had consisted of small talk or eavesdropping. With my newfound abilities, I wanted to see what SL had to offer.

Almost immediately after I entered, a chat bubble appeared over one of the dancing avatars, “Helo Loran.” I immediately felt welcome there. The last club I had visited felt different. I remember feeling out of place there, like I was intruding somewhere uninvited, despite the fact that it was more akin to “my type of scene.” The simple gesture of welcoming me by name instantly set the tone. I accepted the animation and began to dance. The problem was that I could not hear any music. I wrote into the chat box “I can’t hear the music” hoping someone would answer. One avatar came to my rescue but after numerous exchanges and my sound still inaudible, I felt compelled to justify my lack of proficiency, “im still kind of new to this…” I type. Another avatar, Pannie Paperdoll, chimes in, “hi loran! Never fear, we were allll new once!” Pannie is one of the owners of the club. She instant messaged me and we began to chat privately. I think IM has a dual function in SL. First, it is a practical solution when there are many avatars speaking at once. Is it often difficult to know who is talking to whom and instant messaging focuses conversation. The second function of IM is to preserve privacy and create intimacy. (The practical downside of IM is that the text box prevents a full view of the screen. For me, this had the effect of taking me out of my immediate surroundings, making me focus on the text instead of my avatar.) Intimacy is probably a more useful term than privacy, for the effect of IM is more of an opening than a closing. The anonymity and the lack of physical presence create a space for an openness and honesty of communication that is not impossible in real life, but less common. At least this is what I learned from my conversation with Pannie. (Out of all my SL conversations thus far, the most profoundly informative was also the one that I did not save. I wanted to save it, and even asked Pannie’s permission to do so, but I got caught up and my computer froze prior to my having saved it. A fast computer does not make a perfect computer. I became overconfident in technology and learned my lesson. But the positive side is that now I will have to reconstruct the conversation, and the I segments that I remember might shed some light on the meaning it had for me—the heart of the autoethnographic project.)

My conversation with Pannie began as a technical tutorial. She was guiding me through the process of trying to get my sound back on. Yet it quickly turned. “What’s ethnography?” she asked. Not was I completely taken aback by her seemingly psychic power, I could not believe the serendipitous way our conversation turned to my research. I mentioned that I craved “meaningful conversation,” but how could I engage in such a dialogue without disclosing my identity as a student researcher or my logging of the chat. I was unsure as to how I broach this, but Pannie saved me the trouble. I explained the practice of ethnography. “Why do you ask?” I asked, too curious to let the question pass. She told me that it was one of my groups. Of course, the one group I belong to is the Institute for SL Ethnography. I then told her about this class. She was excited about it having herself suggested to Professors that Second Life should be the subject of a sociological study. Paddie then recommended that I read, Second Life(R): A Guide to Your Virtual World (2008) written by her SL friend Ansel Gaspirini (Brain White in real life). She told me that she is “in the book” and that Ansel “watched her grow up.” Again, I read this as another cue that she was a younger woman. I immediately enquired as to which life she was referring to, SL or RL when she said “grow up.” She explained that most ‘noobs’ (SL lingo for ‘newbies, or newcomers) go through certain rights of passage like falling in love, getting married and getting a job. This is part of the process of “growing up” on SL.
I asked Paddie how falling in love differs from its real life counterpart. She answered that the absence of physicality intensifies other aspects of the relationship. “Its like being blind,” she said, “the loss of one sense heightens the others.” I imagine that she has thought about this before. I cannot help but think wonder how my boyfriend would feel if I had a SL relationship. I also wonder about falling in love on SL. What would that be like? Weird, I would imagine. But why is it weird? The bias toward disembodiment prevalent in cultural theory (Hayles 1999) is reversed when it comes to cultural perceptions about relationships. To borrow Hayles’ phrasing, how did love lose its embodiment? Many people, and I am not fully excluding myself, associate SL love with perversion or pathology. “Normal people” do not need to seek out relationships in cyberspace. Though I am not in such an extreme camp, there is strangeness there. But I started reevaluating that concept before I met Paddie and will continue to do so.

Throughout my conversation with Paddie, our avatars were dancing up a storm. We were engaged in a pretty substantial conversation and our avatars were completely unaffected. Dancing is another physical element of the SL embodiment experience that excites me—the instant gratification of immediately “knowing” how to dance with the click of the button. Instant gratification is certainly one element of the pleasure of SL. But there is more to it. When I am dancing, (and especially when doing so with other avatars in sync) I feel like I am a character in a film. Cut to the prom scene or the local dancehall and all of a sudden a song comes on and all the characters in the room magically know the same choreographed dance. I always laughed at those kinds of movies, but perhaps I laughed because I was secretly envious of the characters, of the joy that occurs in us when bodies move in synchronicity. Another element to my enjoyment is the sheer novelty of the experience. While I can envision the enjoyment fading as my avatar “grows up,” at the moment there is pleasure in the newness of Second Life. Sure, we go dancing in New York but do people really let loose the way these avatars do? Sometimes. This is how avatars dance. They dance fully and completely. When the dance alone they embrace their solitude and when they dance together their simultaneity transforms them into pure movement. This novelty can also be phrased as possibility, or becoming. The disembodiment that constitutes SL, that is the absence of the physical materiality of the body, enables a new embodiment with different potentialities than RL. What are released are new possibilities of movement (such as flying, teleporting, and dancing) but also new relational possibilities. Avatars relate to one another in way that is both similar and entirely different to face-to-face life communication.

(I have decided to stop using quotation marks. They imply both a condescension and dismissal of the SL experience even if this is not what I mean they to be. I suppose I am using them as a protective device, as a kind of shield, as a way of warding off potential skeptics. “You can’t ‘grow up’ on Second Life. That is something humans do,” I imagine them saying. But after my earlier conversation, I realize that you can. Second Life can really be a second life, complete with all the complexities and milestones that constitute our real lives. And this second life does not exist in separation from the first. The are dialogically connected. As Paddie so aptly explained to me, “We are still human, just with pixel bodies.”)