Hangin' with the Supremes

A colleague of mine at UR's School of Law showed some interest in promoting Second Life for legal studies, so I thought I'd take a look around for him. Here I'm lounging in one of the Justice's chairs in the Supreme Court of Second Life. Though the in-world courtroom was sufficiently grand, it was unpopulated except for the flat justices you see behind me.


And since the Supreme Court recently issued a decision supporting individual right to keep and bear arms, I thought I'd pose with the Supremes with a digital weapon to commemorate the occasion. I'm not sure if they had assault weapons in mind, but the digital gun I'm posing with is all I had in my SL inventory - I hope my pose doesn't elevate our terror threat level!

At first glance, this may seem a silly idea, but the power of image
can be greater than we think - remember the global riots sparked by
cartoon images of Muhammad?

Images can be powerful, even when they are only orally invoked, as long as they have been branded into our minds through repetition.
While some fears are reasonable, use of fear for political and religious manipulation has a long history. I call this the "booga-booga" effect, and I imagine making a series of stick-puppets, representing the most current guilt/fear manipulators, to help subvert their corrosive effect.

Even the simple sonics of potent phrases like...

"saturday night special"









or "terrorist"

or "mushroom cloud"

can have an astonishing and powerful impact
when repeated by leaders because when we hear them the icons of our mind are invoked and these touch us deeply, often below the level of logic...

voice virgin no more!

Risking digital life & limb with my proximity to the cleaver weilding demonic turkey (back left) that patrols Calletta's Hobo Camp,I finally got myself set up for voice chat in SL with an inexpensive $20 headset with microphone. Here you see me engaged in a voice-chat conversation. The reception was reasonably clear, and it was interesting hearing the voices of the other avatars in my head.

As I've noted in past entries, a key element of spoken word is the unique autograph of embodiment that shapes the soundwaves according to the specific anatomy of the speaker. So, using voice-chat in SL gives avatars a stronger connection to their creators and the specific vocal qualities of each gives greater depth to the character of the avatar. This is but one effect of the resonance of sound.

The only problem with voice-chat is that there is yet no record of the conversation like there is with typed text, no way of recording all the voices in SL dialog.

Thought I thought that voice-chat would make it easier for me to communicate in SL, I still seem to retain a kind of shyness, perhaps more so because my voice is so personal. An unexpected experience!

Another interesting aspect of voice-chat is that avatar voices often carry further than their immediate proximity making it easy to eavesdrop on conversations...
so even loose digital lips might sink digital ships!

A few postings ago, I visited the USC Annenberg conference where "chat" was the main topic of discussion.
During this event major speakers used voice chat while volunteers like Iggy helped to moderate discussion and questions from attendees via type-chat.

In this web page about the discussion,"Chat History from Virtual Worlds" we can see that no voice-chat recording was made, but it makes sense to get voice set up and working smoothly with clear sound before we start recording it. I have tried to record my voice-chat sessions via Mac's GarageBand, but it only picked up my voice. Though I could still hear other avatars, their voices did not record.