You know how telecommunication has been revolutionizing industry and all that? I'm sure you do. And we as individuals get no small benefit, also. I can phone someone on the other side of the world, right? Amazing, isn't it? Whether I have anything worth saying is a whole different question.
But human communication is designed - if you'll forgive my use of that phrase - for face-to-face contact. We read each other not only by listening, but by watching, by touch in certain situations, maybe even by smell on a very subtle, maybe unconscious level. When you're in someone's company, you watch where his eyes are focused, the behavior of his facial muscles, the skin tone, the attitude of his body (as a whole, and with each part relative to the whole), muscle tone, and so on. Every abstraction away from that face-to-face communication tends to transmit a narrower and narrower band.
If you're on vphone or camera chat with someone, you're only able to see a narrow slice, the camera's not as subtle as your own eyeballs, and if scent is used for communication on some subtle level, you don't get that either. If you're just on a regular voice connection, all you get is tone of voice, pace of speech, prosody, things like that - you totally lose the visual aspect. And if you're reading text that someone else has written, well... all you get is the words. Not even the tone, pace, or prosody of it. Hence, if someone does something that irks me slightly, and I say, "Argh, matey, I orta kick yer arse down the street!" (for an example I would probably never use), unless everyone reading it knows me very well, it'll be taken as a threat. So instead, I have to post, "Argh, matey, I orta kick yer arse down the street! lulululu" so everyone knows I'm not serious. And someone who doesn't understand the degeneration from LOL to LUL to lululululul is not going to get it, either. Nor will someone who's had a serious run-in with Anonymous.
(Tangentially: handwritten letters are an exception to the "no tone, no scent" rule. Handwriting does allow for some of the writer's mood to come through - urgency leads to more rushed penmanship, intoxication or sleepiness to a wandering pen tip, anger to stronger strokes or torn paper. Also, any scent associated with the writer will brush off on the paper. I have a letter somewhere that I received from someone I was very fond of, and for the first couple of years I had it at least, if I sniffed it, I got a hint of her perfume and an even more subtle hint of her along with.)
Anyway. Makers of communication technology know about all this. However, they also know that communications technology is largely standardized already into forms that are not ideally suited for displays of emotional reaction, mood, etc. Think about your average computer, which has a typewriter keyboard, a few function keys, a mouse, and maybe a stick. You see the problems immediately. Typewriters are not emotionally responsive instruments. A mouse or a joystick at least tell you something about muscle tone, but only very vaguely, through the way the thing is moved compared to a baseline.
So. Tech manufacturers, whether their products are intended for goofing off, for productive work, or for free and creative work that could be goofing or productive (I'm looking at you, Linden Labs!), have tried to create tools that allow for some more emotional transmission. So you get funny faces like :3, or maybe freeform emotes that allow someone to express whatever he likes. E.g., on IRC, typing in "/me smiles." will produce "Shaviv smiles." 'Course, that's text-only. A visually intensive medium, like Second Life (SL), will allow you to do things like make your avatar dance. (Generally, you can do this by using a script that causes your avatar to move in a certain pattern.)
Generally, the more freedom you have to "do" things, in such communications media, well... the harder it may be to use, although certainly SL has a fairly intuitive interface; but also, the more natural it may feel to use such technology to actually communicate, once you've mastered it.
Really, something like SL - or to a lesser degree, more formulaic and less freeform types of environments, like World of Warcraft and the like - can be pretty absorbing. And I'll admit, I actually will answer to someone who calls me "Shaviv", to my face, even though that is not my name. I've spent enough time immersed, whether in real-time virtual worlds or on blog-boards like this one, that I've absorbed the identity. (Okay - that's an oversimplification. But to hell with the details.) There's actually a health issue here, though.
Can a person become so absorbed, through a virtual-world interface, that this alter-ego becomes more... personally relevant than the real self? I think the answer is yes. I say so because there've been a number, a small but definitely non-zero number, of people who've committed crimes or harmed themselves as a result of virtual-world insults or losses.
Personally, I can say: I try to keep myself out of that by not wearing much of a mask, when operating an avatar in a virtual world or on a discussion site. WYSIWYG - okay, so you don't see my face, obviously, but I'm not that different, and I don't roleplay.
See, I wonder about this alter-ego becoming more important because, well. Let me give you an example.
This is not a cartoon, it's a photograph of someone wearing a pretty good, if slightly creepy, costume. Now, I don't know the wearer's name, but the costume's name is Miharu Nakashima. I've corresponded a bit with the woman who plays Miss Nakashima, because who else must answer the email addressed to her? but the associated website is pretty clear: "I believe in keeping the suit actress's identity secret, so please do not ask for any details about the real me or for an unmasking of any sort." And here what I'm thinking is, isn't this remarkable? - If I lived in her neighborhood of PA I could probably bump into her any day and not notice, but if she were wearing her mask I would know who it is, instantly. Is it just me or is there a major irony here? I know who it is because I can see her mask, but not her face?
This is someone who keeps a separation, which is good. But still,
It's a related question, I think, to ask where our "virtual worlds" technology will go. Neuromancer and Snow Crash come to mind. Now, keeping in mind that these are speculative, we're getting to see some pretty cool stuff as far as neural interfacing goes, right? It wasn't too long ago that the first optical implants, wire grids placed over the visual cortex, were installed in eye-blind human subjects, allowing them to perceive areas of high contrast as edges. Perceive visually, that is. The kind of speculative fiction that I have been reading lately is full of this sort of thing - both people augmenting or replacing damaged or insufficiently effective sense organs with mechanical prosthetics (e.g., the character of Gideon Ravenor, lacking eyes and ears, relying on the cameras and microphones built into his wheelchair to see and hear), and people using technologies to allow them to perceive representations of what's going on in software. Imagine it, if you will, as a graphics card for one's brain.
If creating for yourself an avatar somewhat or wholly unlike you, being able to immerse yourself in controlling it, even being able to experience what it experiences (that's the reason I brought up the implants) isn't mad science, I don't know what is.
;3
(Other diaries in this series include robot safety, ye short fiction, the sociology of fictional places, steam-powered giant robots, thermal depolymerization, nuclear airplanes, psychic powers, transgenic bacteria that make useful compounds, lightning in a jar, neural interfaces, powered armor, sonic weapons, rapid prototyping, putting Mentos and Diet Coke to good use, life on life support, combining farming and electrical generation, pigeon pilots, cuttlefish behind the wheel, the hafnium bomb, and building a better skunk.)