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Dusan, you did it again! We may not always agree (though there really only has been that one time; I posted my counterargument, and that was that), but one thing you never fail to do is: make me think.
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Enough of the personal messages disguised as introduction. ;) Dusan Writer posted "The Web, Drifting Into View" on his blog, based in turn on a piece by David Gelernter, "Time to Take the Internet Seriously", published in Edge.

One aspect of virtuality in general, and Second Life in particular, about which Dusan and I have never parted company is its culture (I'm tempted to capitalize the word -- Culture -- because it carries that much weight). My guess is that, if you were to ask each of us what we mean, we wouldn't answer the same way... but that doesn't mean that we don't grok each other. So, what do I mean by culture? Commonality: shared experience; shared symbology and language; shared worldview; shared purpose; shared philosophies of what is "right behavior", and why, and how to coax it from people... in the case of Second Life, I'll even borrow from archaeology and include a shared "tool kit". The operative word, obviously, is shared.

Dusan waxes more eloquent (as is his wont):

Where else on the Web can you literally walk forward into a future that’s being crafted and created as we walk through it? And where else can you do so where other people share the space with you and may be altering it and changing it as we walk?
[...]
Second Life is nowness without uniformity. Second Life is presence without the lumbering pressure of the algorithm, of homogeneity. Nowness is spiritual and ennobling, but only when our presence in time is our presence in our own truth.
[...]
Second Life is time made visible, history made concrete. A building, a texture, my library of photos of long-forgotten sims aren’t CONTENT, they’re shared histories, and they’re organic, growing, changing, collaborated upon...
Another attitude Dusan and I share about the culture of Second Life is concern about its endangerment; how trends imposed upon it from outside -- by Linden Lab itself, no less -- threaten to dilute it, or wash it completely away.
The more we side bar data and Web-ify it, the more we lose the value of the prim itself, its power as an information atom, and its ability to be assembled with other atoms to create richer meaning than a Wiki, a blog, or a MySpace page.
[...]
If our nowness is presence in the uniformity of Facebook we’re only one cog in an algorithm, our domain of expression of our personal “now” is narrowed, confined, lessened.
[...]
...socially connecting me to 200 people whose names I don’t know in Avatars United doesn’t mean I’ve connected with more people, it means that rather than me drifting into view people have collected me like a baseball card, I’m a Facebook profile now, when what I prefer is to slip into the back of a dance club and listen to the conversation wander and float.
I believe the concerns are real, and they are certainly shared by (some) other Residents who write in the SLogosphere and forums. The question then arises, "What can be done to preserve and maintain this amorphous, evolving thing we call culture, without causing further harm by trying somehow to 'enforce' it with rigidity and the denial of its natural right to change?" The answer is elusive; the attempt to enumerate points imposes the very rigidity we are trying to avoid. Nevertheless, I don't believe the task is as daunting as might be first thought, and there are two examples from the real world to back me up.

To set the stage: Gelernter made this his Point #31 (which Dusan also quoted):
The net will never become a mind, but can help us change our ways of thinking and change, for the better, the spirit of the age. This moment is also dangerous: virtual universities are good but virtual nations, for example, are not. Virtual nations — whose members can live anywhere, united by the Internet — threaten to shatter mankind like glass into razor-sharp fragments that draw blood. We know what virtual nations can be like: Al Qaeda is one of the first.
Mr. Gelernter is mistaken. The first "virtual nation" to make an indelible mark on history was forcibly created in 70 C.E. It exists to this day, and is commonly called the Jewish Diaspora. Despite centuries of iniquities performed against them (which I hope needn't be enumerated here), they survived -- at times, they flourished -- and even picked up a few additional members along the way, myself being one.

The success of my first example in preserving their diverse, evolving culture in exile in the face of such adversity caused my second example to consult the first for advice. In 1990, His Holiness the Dalai Lama invited a cross-section of intellectual Diaspora Jewry to Dharamsala, India -- the "capital" of Tibet-in-exile -- precisely for that purpose. A great deal else was learned in the process; it is described as a personal experience by Rodger Kamenetz in his 1994 book The Jew in the Lotus (which I strongly recommend to Jews, Buddhists, and those "Juddhists" in between who have already discovered the striking similarities, as well as to curious goyim).

A virtual "nation" or culture is not dangerous merely because it lacks a physical homeland. Nor is a culture founded in a virtual "homeland" irrevocably endangered by adversity thrust upon it. Resistance is not futile; you may refuse to assimilate.

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