Learning To Act In The Metaverse

How can real and virtual space interactions generate novel forms of communicative, creative and social practices in global connected communities? Is it possible to avoid unleashing the seemingly inevitable dichotomies in humankind constructing and destroying at the same time? My personal interest in further contributing to the complexity of this discussion is to offer some examples of how the dynamic interplay between technology, culture and sciences calls for novel pedagogical forms and strategies that seek to foster student-centered, self-regulated, participatory, interactive, and immersive learning. This book thereby deals with the complexity of the global data space and its adherent aspects in social, aesthetic and technological contexts. To this end I discuss some of the prevalent models of participatory media culture, its historical roots and its creative potential for seamless operation in real and virtual environments. I will also highlight some of the core practices of media production, reception and perception with regard to future concepts of designing and augmenting public and individual data collections for the purpose of creating a gigantic database. In this global connected info space where there is no longer any ontological difference between the real and the virtual, novel forms of human-machine interaction will impact tremendously and pervasively on almost all life issues. Intelligent agents, augmented eyewear, and virtual world avatars and habitats are only a few existing examples that signal the forthcoming changes in networked societies. The ever-increasing possibilities to interact with computer technology can lead to both techno-utopia and dystopia. A so10 11 Introduction ciety fully wired and connected is prone to control and surveillance, even though civil counterstrike techniques aim for equiveillance, a state of equilibrium, or at least a desire to attain a state of equilibrium, between surveillance and sousveillance. Are these viable models that will protect us from total control? To what extent are we captivated in complicity, and how can we develop alternative strategies and models without pushing the exit button? And do the virtual and the virtue, interpreted as inseparable experiences of the factual and the fictive, allow for another paradigm shift—co-existence seen as a viable future option in order to survive on this planet? During the last decade we have seen a nearly all-encompassing approach to the digitalization of knowledge and information stored and circulated in private and public domains. Not only has technology improved in its capacity, pace and scope following the periodical 18-month cycles of Moore’s Law, but also our abilities to cope with new cultural techniques commonly subsumed under the label ‘digital literacy’. After the rise and fall of the new economy, reliant as it was on the false assumption of transferring the factory model of mass production to a completely different concept of an Internet economy, it took some time to learn from past failures. This new model, which is based not on scarcity but on abundance, forms the primary difference between the Internet economy and the real world. Parallel to the spread of the WWW that emerged out of academic networks, cooperation and collaboration, the free software movement and later open source, have become the congruent architecture and driving force of the Internet up to the present. In the pursuit of the apparatus, from Freud’s “prosthesis god” to “the extension of men” (McLuhan) to wearable computers (Steve Mann), single user interaction has shifted into multiple Introduction user interaction on various platforms with either time-based (video sharing), image-based (photo sharing), text-based (blogs and wikis) or audio-based (podcasts) focus. The driving force behind this global move towards self-expression, authenticity and community building is rooted equally in human nature’s inherent narcissism and the basic desire to belong to a specific group. Both extremes, idiosyncratic exposure and social networking are phenomena that do not constitute media culture per se, but rather belong to a newly observed phenomenon in current Web 2.0 developments. Accordingly, two main characteristics drive social media. One dates back to Mark Granovetter’s ground-breaking article “The strength of the weak ties” from 1973. Based on a study of job seekers, he discovered that finding a new position does not come through the strong ties (friends or relatives), but through the extended network of weak ties (in over 80% of cases). Similar observations can be made inside “social utility tools” (Facebook) that connect people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. This so-called long tail effect also has implications for the producers of content, especially those whose products could not—for economic reasons —find a place in pre-Internet information distribution channels controlled by book publishers, record companies, movie studios, and television networks. From the producers’ standpoint, the Long Tail has made possible a flowering of creativity across all fields of human endeavor. One example of this surge is YouTube, where thousands of diverse videos—whose content, production value or lack of popularity make them inappropriate for traditional television—are easily accessible to a wide range of viewers. It is exactly this spirit of participation, cooperation and sharing that has fundamentally changed media perception, re12 Introduction ception and production. The shift from implicit (tacit knowledge) to explicit forms of knowledge sharing has paved the way for new forms of collective intelligence, which one pioneer, George Pór, defined as “the capacity of human communities to evolve towards higher order complexity and harmony, through such innovation mechanisms as differentiation and integration, competition and collaboration.”(http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/) As the entire media architecture has shifted from pure consumerism to a creative participatory media culture, the user is no longer reliant on a single expert opinion. Instead, he can refer to multiple and multimodal information resources to be validated, structured and organized through peer review and intelligent agents. Consequently the enormous amount of information and knowledge resources available on ubiquitous, circumfluent displays in private and public spaces raises new questions on private/public safety, control, and legal issues, for example in consumer detection. “You can’t hide anything anymore,” says Don Tapscott, co-author of The Naked Corporation, a book about corporate transparency, and Wikinomics. Thus the core truth is this: If you are in the web, people will find out. Yet what becomes visible to ordinary Web users displays only a small fraction (15%) of the much bigger, invisible deep Web, content that is not part of the surface Web indexed by search engines. The “world” is turned “outside in” (the physical is being represented in the virtual), and the metaverse is going “inside out” (virtually-controlled sensors are permeating the physical world). Will it be possible in the future to express our thoughts, feelings, emotions and desires through an electronic communication system? In this context, the observation tools of an Augmented 13 Introduction Reality world are turned inward, serving as an adjunct memory. Lifelogging systems are used to capture both the practical and the transient. Besides the political implications, they also have significant personal implications: do we envisage a world knowing that everything we say or do is likely to be recorded? Is the answer a concept of radical transparency and authenticity, or do we simply wish to become invisible, undetected—a blank sheet, an empty record in the data-space? “Trust” is not a viable concept either, at least for those concerned about liberal democracy, social justice and the welfare state. It is a morally ambiguous concept that can easily turn into anti-utopia. Terrorist attacks and their aftermath have shown us how drastic the effects were on widely divergent levels of control over and access to information, especially personal information. Open source principles such as radical transparency, meritocracy, consensus, and networked collaboration that were discarded long ago by business are nowadays the greatest wordof-mouth amplifier in history: consumers learn to trust peers more and companies less. A similar trend is true for businesses and institutions that are shifting from command and control to processes of sharing observations, concerns and suggestions with the intention of improving the customer/client relationship. At the same time every transaction an individual makes on the Internet leaves behind a traceable consumer profile that can be turned into profitable business. Thus, coming back to the techniques of sousveillance, it appears paradoxical to solve a problem with the same means that actually caused the problem. The assumption of reciprocity-based control in networking culture, which is driven by power laws, conflicts with the hegemonic claims of global capitalism. The mechanisms of control are in fact a non-zero-sum game. 14 Introduction Somewhat metaphorically though, I introduce the concept of camouflage as a tactic of survival, ranging from concealing species in nature to traditional pattern paintings, radar-absorbing dark paint, liquid crystal displays up to phased array optics applying a three-dimensional hologram of background scenery. I will also argue that the human quest for the perfect cloaking device repeats the mythology of Perseus, who went equipped with a helm of invisibility to kill Medusa. This kind of synopsis, the combination of two “realities” by means of human vision and a technical apparatus, together with the magic helm of invisibility, makes Perseus a prototypical example of today’s advanced technology-supported warfare tactics. Nevertheless, technologies increasingly reliant on vision surveillance systems suggest a need for strike-back strategies that are neither individual, nor vision-based. As visual information increasingly becomes digital data fed into distributed databases, any kind of inverse surveillance technique must therefore implicate data manipulation and obliteration. Spanning the spectrum of interrelated artistic questions and scientific findings, the reader will gain new insights from the standpoint of the “Phenomenology of Perception” (MerleauPonty, 1945) and cognitive neuroscience: as the body is the basis for our interactions and perceptions, virtual space can only be seen as a symbiotic synthesis of technology and corporeal phenomena. Consequently, the construction of self in virtual environments follows an alternative mode of “representation”, which synergizes the physical and the virtual: the mind and body become one in order to pursue a unified goal. This experience of virtual reality illusions reflects Baudrillard’s wishful thinking—yet in other contexts––to return back to appearance in the world of illusions rather than disappearing in the world of simulations. When there is no more real, the 15 Introduction frontiers blur between facts and information, between information and entertainment, between entertainment and politics. The result is an overarching aesthetization of everything; thus, contemporary art has become interchangeable, based on its self-referential autonomy. Concepts of remediation that oscillate between artistic strategies, techniques and concepts are however in a constant flux of imaginary and representative approximation upon an initial concept, an idea that undergoes several processes until it reaches a certain kind of permutation, regardless of whether it is reality or fiction, fact or fantasy, authenticity or simulation. Navigation, orientation and communication in real and virtual surroundings become increasingly context dependent in ambient intelligent environments. Will this lead to a union of human and machine, combining the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our own creative manifestations? Or will this mean a radical suspension or demise of our innate sensual abilities in the future? A rather different approach that brings us back to human evolution relates to the concept of Consciousness Singularity: the idea that it is impossible for us to imagine “what it’s like” with our current limited cognitive abilities. Our brain is deceptive in terms of visual perception and interpretation, and the link between what we expect to see, and what our brain tells us we actually see, is an imaginative one. The final chapter deals with some of the most prevalent questions relating to proximities of scientific and artistic engagement in light of educational change. I will argue that paradigmatic changes in the process of renewing and preserving the conditions of cultural self-organization are key to a major 16 Introduction shift in how we construct knowledge, technology and cultural memory. However, novel theoretical delineations of model, game and communication knowledge in different contexts have had less impact on learning and knowledge organization thus far. The audiovisual restructuring of knowledge and communication in interrelated and cooperating fields extended by neurophysiological research into cognition and perception will affect institutions and the individual, resulting in a conceptual lag in both teachings and research. Not only are knowledge and media technology changing rapidly, but learning attitudes and styles are also changing fluidly across different technologies, interfaces and modes of interaction. Learning to act in the metaverse is a plea, a suggestion an