Thursday, March 6, 2008

SecondLife/Mapping

SecondLife got me thinking about cognitive mapping. Perhaps this is a bit of a stretch, but are programs such as SecondLife, Sims, and the like ways of helping us understand our places in hte totality of cities and the world in reality? By turning our society and cities into a program, it seems that perhaps we are mapping (or attempting to map) the world we inhabit. As with cognitive mapping, it is not possible to actually represent the totality of society, so these programs are only partial and always incomplete representations of what is far too complex to be mapped. Maybe the reduction of some aspects of society to computer code somehow helps us understand it better? Is is possible that these programs could offer us a way of understanding our place better? (Sorry that this post is rather disorganized and a bit of a ramble; I'm not so sure if I have managed to get my thoughts clear or comprehensible in my head either.)

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