To bane or not to be - Blogpost by a family member
WHAT IS THIS THING?!!! Being bane! What is this immense madness that has descended upon us. Banishment! Being banished. To choose isolation in a world where interaction is the goal would at a first glance seem to be counterproductive. Interaction is what makes us log onto Second Life instead of watching TV. We thrive for building networks... We live our "second life" to interact!
Having family members who - with no prior notice - went "bane" initially made me boil with frustration. Then fume with anger. And finally today cold acceptance. I reckon that these feelings are mostly fuelled by my own selfishness.
Frustration. - why oh why? I felt deprived of something precious. And something that makes me log on each day. Learning the terms and length of the sentences, it seems almost impossible to live through. Disbelief and agony. To have to look at - and be in the presence of - two of the persons I care for and love ... And not be able to be with them as my equals.
Anger - I want this person to deal with ME! - not to hover about on a cloud. Like a ghost! Who are they to choose to do without me! Without anyone for that sake. Why did I not have a say in this?... Gaaa. How could they? How could they be so .... selfish? How can I be so selfish to crave them to be present?
Acceptance - life goes on At terms with initial responses. Long way to go and no need sulking. And sooner or later, they will need someone to be there for them. That someone will be I. They chose to go bane - so be it. Mistress is not letting them off the hook, that thing is certain, so best make the best of it
To answer the opening question of this entry "what is this thing?", we need to go way back. Through history, people have for some reason or the other chosen to voluntarily live in celibacy and isolation. Sarah MacDonald describes in the book "Holy cow - an Indian adventure" a stay at a buddhist monastery (chapter 5 - suitingly titled "Insane in the membrane"). Ten days straight, talking prohibited. She describes this treatment in the very first line of the chapter as a "brain enema".
Later she somewhat gives a reason for submitting to this: After handing in my passport, my diary, my book and my pens, I'm giving the only thing I can read for ten days: the rulebook and schedule. Over the next week I'll study the pamphlet as much as the princess in "Still Life with Woodpecker" contemplates the Camel cigarette packet. Yet it won't speak to me in the same way - I won't see alien life forms, or secret messages, just a way of life I never thought I'd embrace
.... just a way of life I thought I'd never embrace.
As with a short time in a monastery, so is bane'ing. something SO far away from real life - as it possibly can be. Though a stay at the monastery is submission to a discipline self imposed at each time, banishment is submission to an externally imposed physical and social discipline. Whether it is self-ordered or no is irrelevant. It is imposed either by the dogma that is a monastery or an irremovable suit.
A hot topic right now is "augmented reality", to mix human interaction with computer generated data - a scientific term for cyborgism. We add our personality to an avatar and encode it with a computer. We send all of this through a network of servers and it is all decoded by a computer and ultimately by the person in the other end. Vice versa, we receive other avatars' encoded personalities which we decode. The computer is a blurring filter to our "selves" through this complex system of codings and decodings.
Everytime there is a coding/decoding lies the possibility of a data loss. And when a lot of what is communicated are feelings that can be hard enough to express in the real world, we are inheritly born handicapped in this our "Second Life".
Well - I guess banes are on the pinnacle of this augmental revolution, selectively abandoning substantial liberties given by technology. Choosing to go handicapped in a handicapped world.
- This rest is silence.
(No need to sign this - those who need to know knows. )
WHAT IS THIS THING?!!! Being bane! What is this immense madness that has descended upon us. Banishment! Being banished. To choose isolation in a world where interaction is the goal would at a first glance seem to be counterproductive. Interaction is what makes us log onto Second Life instead of watching TV. We thrive for building networks... We live our "second life" to interact!
Having family members who - with no prior notice - went "bane" initially made me boil with frustration. Then fume with anger. And finally today cold acceptance. I reckon that these feelings are mostly fuelled by my own selfishness.
Frustration. - why oh why? I felt deprived of something precious. And something that makes me log on each day. Learning the terms and length of the sentences, it seems almost impossible to live through. Disbelief and agony. To have to look at - and be in the presence of - two of the persons I care for and love ... And not be able to be with them as my equals.
Anger - I want this person to deal with ME! - not to hover about on a cloud. Like a ghost! Who are they to choose to do without me! Without anyone for that sake. Why did I not have a say in this?... Gaaa. How could they? How could they be so .... selfish? How can I be so selfish to crave them to be present?
Acceptance - life goes on At terms with initial responses. Long way to go and no need sulking. And sooner or later, they will need someone to be there for them. That someone will be I. They chose to go bane - so be it. Mistress is not letting them off the hook, that thing is certain, so best make the best of it
To answer the opening question of this entry "what is this thing?", we need to go way back. Through history, people have for some reason or the other chosen to voluntarily live in celibacy and isolation. Sarah MacDonald describes in the book "Holy cow - an Indian adventure" a stay at a buddhist monastery (chapter 5 - suitingly titled "Insane in the membrane"). Ten days straight, talking prohibited. She describes this treatment in the very first line of the chapter as a "brain enema".
Later she somewhat gives a reason for submitting to this: After handing in my passport, my diary, my book and my pens, I'm giving the only thing I can read for ten days: the rulebook and schedule. Over the next week I'll study the pamphlet as much as the princess in "Still Life with Woodpecker" contemplates the Camel cigarette packet. Yet it won't speak to me in the same way - I won't see alien life forms, or secret messages, just a way of life I never thought I'd embrace
.... just a way of life I thought I'd never embrace.
As with a short time in a monastery, so is bane'ing. something SO far away from real life - as it possibly can be. Though a stay at the monastery is submission to a discipline self imposed at each time, banishment is submission to an externally imposed physical and social discipline. Whether it is self-ordered or no is irrelevant. It is imposed either by the dogma that is a monastery or an irremovable suit.
A hot topic right now is "augmented reality", to mix human interaction with computer generated data - a scientific term for cyborgism. We add our personality to an avatar and encode it with a computer. We send all of this through a network of servers and it is all decoded by a computer and ultimately by the person in the other end. Vice versa, we receive other avatars' encoded personalities which we decode. The computer is a blurring filter to our "selves" through this complex system of codings and decodings.
Everytime there is a coding/decoding lies the possibility of a data loss. And when a lot of what is communicated are feelings that can be hard enough to express in the real world, we are inheritly born handicapped in this our "Second Life".
Well - I guess banes are on the pinnacle of this augmental revolution, selectively abandoning substantial liberties given by technology. Choosing to go handicapped in a handicapped world.
- This rest is silence.
(No need to sign this - those who need to know knows. )
Augmented reality...but that gets to a deeper question "Who are you", I don't think we add our persona to our Avatar, we add a lot of ormed from our interactions with other Avatars, a lot of who we'd truly *love* to be, and a small bit of who we are.
ReplyDeleteBut then...we remember the feelings and actions and ideas of our Avatar in our First Life, and add a bit of that to ourselves
Where does the Avatar stop, and the person begin? Or do they start to become one?
And this experience precisely parallels my experience with Sophia.