Look in the Gap

Schuyler Maclay and Adam Hoffman

“For while the facts attached to any event born of a MUD’s strange ethereal universe may march in straight, tandem lines separated neatly into the virtual and the real, its meaning lies always in the gap.”

-Dibbell, pg 16

Dibbel writes that even when we consider a world consisting of the virtual and the real, meaning always lies in the gap between the two. This is the case whether one is considering online social networking sites like Facebook, or an elaborate virtual world like Second Life.

When presented with an online virtual world like Second Life, one at first assumes that an implicit goal is to create a world that is in many ways independent of our own. But as Dibbel points out, this is an unrealistic expectation. However, this doesn’t mean that Second Life and its brethren have failed. Rather, we should see their purpose as crucially tied to their relationship with real life. If I create an avatar on Second Life and act a certain way, what is meaningful might not be the characteristics of the avatar itself but how it compares to the real me. It is not what we create in digital environments that matters, instead what is meaningful is the transformation.

The comparison between people and their digital identities on social networking sites is similarly fruitful. In fact, Boyd’s argument hinges on not just what teenage life is like, nor what MySpace or social identities are like, but instead she focus on the relationships and the conflicts which arise between the two.