After I posted my review of Second Life as community building tool, a member of ACORN informed me that their organization has 70 Second Life members. So the idea that there could be hidden civic spaces was still on my mind this morning while I was sorting through diverging views on the Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah hate triangle.
On the Mosaic blog, David Michaelis talks about how unspoken feelings fuel exchanges of artillery:
`Peace’ is a term not used in the public space in Israel anymore…No one expects any dialogue on a real practical level. The military always offers a shortsighted immediate way out. The wish to identify with the power of the gun and the uniform is still alive in Israeli tribal DNA. Revenge is a word not used in the open; it is there in the undercurrent of the emotions expressed by the public, our bombardment of Gaza had the same motive behind it.
Thus I started wondering whether there might be an alternative dialogue going on in Second Life.
First I decided to swing by ACORN. Below is a screenshot of me hanging out by ACORN’s kiosk, noting they’ve been getting donations in Linden Cash (the Second Life version of Monopoly money). (After I took this screenshot, ACORN also added sandwich board signs about the danger of lead in Sherwin-Williams paint):
Unfortunately ACORN’s information spot is suffering from the same neighborhood degradation as the rest of Second Life. If I’d widened the camera angle a bit, you might catch a row of billboards advertising “Escorts for Dummies”. What you can see in this shot is the Weapons store in the background. Not an auspicious start for my search.
I tried a number of terms: Lebanon, Hezbollah, Palestine…no luck at all. I’d be surprised if such gatherings didn’t exist. Maybe Second Life uses a terrorism keyword filter to block certain group names. Hmmm…hope my search didn’t trigger Homeland Security alarms.
I did find two Israeli groups (note the screenshot claims I’m now an Israeli citizen), but I didn’t see any note about where they hang out. If they have a place, I wonder whether its ancient (the Temple of Solomon) or modern downtown Jerusalem. On the other hand, Hezbollah’s claim to be a community service enriching the lives of the Lebonese people, might be well-served by a Second Life community center. This could host meet ups of Lebonese expats all over the world and provide informational brochures for curious visitors. One of the chief problems of the war zone is that as a place gets dangerous to visit, it gets harder and harder to understand.
Given today’s news about Reuters firing a Lebonese reporter for putting out fake atrocity pictures, adding fuel to Israel’s Hezbollywood, accusations, it seems like we might as well be playing diplomatic games in cyberspace. After all, who even knows what’s real at this point?
I wonder whether meeting in a cyberspace where there are no permanently marked bodies might change the tenor of the conversation. Will avatars start to convert each other and sieze the land of the infidel? Will avatars that belong to a certain group be presumed to be more shifty or mooching or aggressive? Will revenge count in the real world? (scratch that – revenge and gang warfare are certainly alive and well on Wikipedia, so there must be something cathartic about it…)
If there are such cyberspace conversations going on, it would be interesting to compare them to the commentary from journalists and the futzing about of the U.N.. There could be a huge gap between the way countries officially talk to each other, and what people would say if they met on the (virtual) street. As the current experience of the U.S. shows, a significant difference between the disposition of average people and the posturing of their government can be overcome through persistant lateral communication. Perhaps it just takes the will of the people to communicate to de-escalate tenstions in the Middle East.
