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Scylla Rhiadra

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Everything posted by Scylla Rhiadra

  1. Scylla Rhiadra
    Wait, what????
  2. Scylla Rhiadra
    I think of myself as someone who is relatively attentive both to equality issues, and the ways in which images "mean," but I have to say I saw nothing offensive whatsoever about the image. In fact, I think I made a joke about it. I will also say that critiquing an image posted here is, in my view, fair game, in exactly the same way and for the same reasons that critiquing a post consisting entirely of text is justified. Images "say things" too, and one shouldn't be afraid of examining those meanings and, in some cases, the unintended implications. But "critiquing" is not the same as asking that an image be removed. I could go on at length about my reading of Seicher's image -- which is clever and beautifully done -- and why I don't have objections to it, but we don't want a derail here. Suffice it to say that one does not free women to explore their sexuality by telling them how they can or cannot explore and express it.
  3. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, I think what it means is that there is a very supportive community in the vanity threads. You can't "force" people to give your pics 20 or 30 likes -- that happens because those who post there want to show their appreciation for how other people have expressed themselves through their avatars and their pics. No "scorn laughs," very few "confused" faces -- just people being nice to other people. I think it's really rather lovely. It's a very friendly, inclusive, and welcoming community.
  4. Scylla Rhiadra
    I'm voting with you on this one, Bree. I have a friend in RL who lives Halloween so much, her Christmas decorations are festooned with cobwebs and her tree decorated with plastic spiders. Lovely woman, but . . . no. Just, no.
  5. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, not exactly, no. I think given the topic of this thread -- the SL "intelligentsia" -- it's entirely appropriate to talk about the role of artists within SL insofar as they can be seen as part of such a semi-mythical body. What I suggested is that a discussion of the particular theme of that one particular installation -- feminism and women's rights -- was off topic. Your comments weren't addressing Debora's role as an artist; they were about what she had to say about women. I actually think that Rolig has hit on an interesting point that is applicable to SL, which features a kind of marriage of at least subsets of science -- computer science and mathematics, anyway -- and the humanities. AM Radio, possibly SL's most famous artist, was trained in art . . . but he worked for IBM. And he's currently experimenting with AI-generated art, in part with the metaverse in mind. I find those connections interesting and suggestive.
  6. Scylla Rhiadra
    SL is the embodiment of a science- and math-enabled platform that offer endless opportunities for the humanist. If ever there was a platform that brought the arts, philosophy, and music together with applied science, this is it. I teach literature. I have far more engagement with those working in the.sciences here than I do at my own university.
  7. Scylla Rhiadra
    Are you familiar with Jacob Brownowski, Rolig. He addressed exactly this issue. Brilliant man.
  8. Scylla Rhiadra
    Sssssshhhhh! Jesus, woman. Keep your head down!
  9. Scylla Rhiadra
    God damn it! STARTING CLICKING, PEOPLE! I NEED NEARLY 6000 MORE!!!
  10. Scylla Rhiadra
    Or, as it turns out, from me!
  11. Scylla Rhiadra
    I think this goes a long way to explaining the increase that I, personally, have seen in "scorn laugh" (and also "confused") reactions. Whereas one might once have responded with a post to something with which one took issue, there is a great likelihood of such written responses being dealt with as "off topic," "an interpersonal dispute," or even the dreaded "RL politics!" It's a way of showing disagreement without running the risk of being subject to moderation. So, I get it. I don't do it, but I think it's actually an unintended consequence of the new rules. It's understandable, and I don't find it offensive. Having said that, I should also point out that this isn't "new." There are at least a couple of people who have been well known for quite some time to use "scorn laughs." Probably the most obvious of those is @Klytyna, who once posted prolifically here, but now only pops in to sprinkle reactions hither and yon. I'm not sure what sponsored the change (threat of discipline?), but most of us posting with regularity here have probably received them. And it's fine. Neither Klytyna nor the other person to whom I am alluding (you know who you are!) use scorn laughs exclusively: I will occasionally even get "thank yous" from Klytana. I'm cool with it, and I'm cool with her (and with the other person, who famously once offered me cookies). They are who they are, they do what they do, and it really doesn't bother me. In fact, I like both of them. (Personally, I think that Klytyna is a case of unrequited love, and she's just trying to get my attention, like the grade school boy dipping my ponytail into an inkwell. I LOVE YOU TOO, KLYTYNA!! 🙂 )
  12. Scylla Rhiadra
    I remember a number of years ago attending a lecture by a physicist on the subject of the plays of Samuel Beckett. He related to them to quantum mechanics and the many worlds theory. There were, to be sure, some problems with the paper, and some naive assumptions, but it was generally a fascinating and really fruitful discussion. I wish I knew of more of this kind of thing. What is really required is a cooperative approach between the sciences and the humanities (and we can add the social sciences to that as well), where each is informing the other. We are all highly specialized, and collaborative, hybridized work is the best, and maybe the only way, to make this work. I think that, to some degree, we have that now in SL. A great many "social issues" in SL, of the sort that are often the focus of humanities scholars, have technical origins and/or solutions on this platform, and discussions of them in an SL context often involve both elements. A good simple example that I find fascinating is the fact that gender in SL is represented, in computational code terms, as a float rather than an integer. I'd totally welcome discussions here that examined things like consent or identity in terms of the code. They sometimes happen: we could do more of them, and better. And a vital first step, of course, is to recognize the validity of both perspectives, and the value that can be produced by using one to interrogate and complicate the other.
  13. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, the practical difference is that one is in SL, and uses the tools provided here to produce it's effects and meanings, and the other isn't. As much as I'd love to get into the issue of how and what Debora's installation works, a discussion of her view of the place of women in our culture is off-topic for this thread, and would get it locked. The one thing I will point out is that the installation is visual and quite immersive. You can't really have a discussion of it, or indeed of any form of "art" in SL, without reference to the thing itself, of which the text is only a relatively small and marginal part. First, no . . . I love art and literature, and in that sense "prefer" them over straight polemic, but I am not arguing that they are better or more important elements of public discourse. They are a part of the overall puzzle, not a "preferred" replacement for all of the other forms in which it can take. I was mostly making the point that one of the more popular ways in which we do talk about issues in SL is through its art. And, "art is in the eye of the beholder"? And it's more "palatable" to me because I can twist it to mean what I want? No, that's actually not how art works. Any of it. There is an indefinitely enormous range of ways one can read and understand, say, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, but it does not follow that all are equally valid, or that there is no "wrong way" to read it. Criticism, close reading, are in that sense no different than any other form of critical understanding: they are evidence based. If you can demonstrate that evidence exists within a work to support your reading, and is not contradicted by other evidence, then you might have a winner. But you don't get to arbitrarily reshape a work's meanings according to your own preferences. Art is, by definition, not a tabula rasa upon which you can scribble whatever it is that you want. And learning how to read it intelligently, and with an eye to nuance and subtlety is hard work. We have entire university programmes devoted to learning how to do it well for a reason. ETA: I don't know why you differentiate between "art" and Tom MacDonald's music. The latter is also art. It's not, in my opinion, very good or interesting art, but that doesn't change its status. And being "good" is not, btw, a function of ideology. I think that the ideological views of, say, the Roman satirist Juvenal or the modernist novelist D. H. Laurence are abhorrent and stupid -- but they're both absolutely brilliant artists for all that.
  14. Scylla Rhiadra
    I don't think you need to even gesture in the direction of an "apology," nor be "sad" about how your brain may or may not be wired. It's silly to be prescriptive about how one should respond to things like reactions on posts. We ARE all different, and that's kind of a good thing. At the very least, it helps defeat the social engineering that lies behind the provision of things like "likes" and other social rewards on social media. All reactions are is another piece of information associated with something that has been said, I think. One can argue that it's actually more silly not to pay attention to all of the information with which we are provided. And after all, the forums are social place. This is just another facet of that. There are, for sure, "healthy" and "unhealthy" ways to read reactions, but there's certainly no one "right" way.
  15. Scylla Rhiadra
    Hmm. This is an aspect of the question I hadn't even considered. I think the only times I pay attention to how other people react to someone else's post are on those rare occasions when I'll see a reaction from someone I generally respect / agree with that surprises me. And in those instances, its only real effect is to make me pay a bit more attention to possible nuances I might have missed in the post. I suppose it operates in that sense as a kind of red flag. It doesn't impact on my own reaction directly, but it alerts me to the possibility I might have missed something.
  16. Scylla Rhiadra
    I don't think many people care about overall reputation scores, or who "wins the day" -- none of that is directly visible now. But yes, of course people care about the likes, laughs, sad faces, and confused faces they receive for individual posts. It's a form of validation from the community. The degree people care likely varies from individual, but these are like a pat on the back or murmurs of approval. We care.
  17. Scylla Rhiadra
    I think we'd be safer (in lots of ways) if we kept the discussion immediately SL-related. So, as a sort of SL analogue to Tom MacDonald, or Rage Against the Machine, or whoever, consider things like in-world exhibitions and events that have an "intellectual" component (whatever that means). Now, I've done a number of these, but, as I'm a modest, shrinking violet myself, I will instead cite as an example the current installation by Debora Kaz "Invisible Cities -- Fighting Women" (the link takes you to Inara's review of the exhibition). It's a great installation -- really well done from an artistic perspective, and very engaging. But it's not obviously providing "new information" or analysis about its subject (which is violence against women). What it does do is reframe and recontextualize things we already "know" or that have been said at more length elsewhere in a medium that is both more pleasant to experience than a straight-forward polemic (the ancients called this utile dulci -- sort of "a spoon full of medicine" to make the lesson go down more easily) and "new" precisely because what art endeavours to do is provide new insights through an aesthetic experience. So, you won't get new "data" or information from Kaz's exhibition, but you may walk away with new insights or perspectives on a familiar subject, because that's one of the things that art "does." I think you can argue that things like Kaz's installation are contributions to public discourse. They are "public humanities" as well as art, because they raise consciousness about issues, they provoke discussion, and they enable new ways of thinking about them. And because they attract a subset of people who are there for the "art" rather than the "issue," they reach out into a broader public. Now, it's still a small public. I'm not sure how many people actually saw my "Virtual Toxic" exhibit, but based on the size of the crowd at the opening, and the number of pictures I sold, I'd guess a few hundred? Which is great -- but still not the kind of reach that can really impact upon SL's overall culture. But it's a start. And it's probably more than read my posts here.
  18. Scylla Rhiadra
    I totally would have been able to guess that. The theme to Dr. Who, right?
  19. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, "guidance" is a tricky term -- does a teacher "guide" -- or "enable"? Probably a bit of both. And the teacher should be listening to the students as well. The examples you've provided seem to sort of undercut this point though: the intelligentsia who adopted and adapted punk, for instance, weren't merely "interpreting" it -- they were deploying it, and in the process changing it and making it something new and equally valuable, if somewhat different. And that re-deployment in turn affected other social, cultural, and intellectual movements and phenomenon. Unless what you mean by "interpret" is more or less the same as "adapt" and "redeploy"? It's certainly not, in any case, the role of an "observer": it's active rather than passive. The actual process by which cultural, political, and intellectual change happens is, of course, hugely complicated -- punk didn't just pop out of the heads of the street youth of the 70s, for instance: it couldn't have existed without all that had gone before it, including the work of the intelligentsia. Consider, for instance, the influence of people like William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Patti Smith -- all arguably proto-punk to some degree, and all very much a part of what I'd call "the intelligentsia."
  20. Scylla Rhiadra
    I think that what you are describing is not so much the "intelligentsia" as academia itself -- which overlaps with, but is not synonymous with the former. Academics do exactly what you describe here -- they determine what is happening, and then try to explain it with reference to other phenomenon. And in that sense, academics are important because they inform the discourse of the intelligentsia. They provide much of the data, the raw lumber, for their ruminations. But, historically, the "intelligentsia" has included not merely academics, but also artists and writers, poets and musicians, labourers and students. And I think they do see their task as different from that of the scholars. Scholarship may, of course, conclude with suggestions about how to make something "better," but that is not its primary function, and the importance of objectivity and disinterested inquiry limit the degree to which they can intervene. THAT is the task of the intelligentsia. Putatively. And, again, the "democracy of voices" thing -- the intelligentsia can't, and shouldn't "dictate." They should, at best, guide and educate. To be effective, they need to have a foot in both worlds -- both as something like scholars, but also as members of the public themselves, engaged in public discussion, rather than passing down The Law on stone tablets. Again, that's the whole premise of the "public intellectual," who is someone in the public sphere, and not above or outside it.
  21. Scylla Rhiadra
    I totally agree. (See my second post on this!)
  22. Scylla Rhiadra
    To return to a point I made earlier here -- the "intelligentsia" can't really exist as a series of disconnected "smart people" or "thinkers": they need to be networked in an effective way that allows them to engage not merely with each other, but with the population whom they (putatively) serve. The last point is important, I think: in the past, coteries of the "intelligentsia" were often so alienated from their own cultures that they functioned, in practice, as little more than debating clubs. The whole concept of the "public intellectual" is built upon the premise that they are engaged with the public. If they seek to make change, it is not a change effected from the top down, but rather a more fundamental paradigm shift in how the larger public thinks. And that relates too to the point I made about "democratizing" this discourse: public intellectual, and the intelligentsia, if they are to have any relevance at all, must not merely talk at the public, but with it. The result should be, hopefully, a democracy of voices, even if the political and social mechanisms of a true democracy don't exist. If enough of a population are persuaded through well-informed and public discourse, then change can be effected even without democratic structures. Get enough people in SL sufficiently upset about something that they threaten the platform's bottom line (however minutely), and we can get action. That has happened on a few occasions in SL. So, how do we achieve that? SL's communication tools are awful. The suggestion that we should take such discussions in-world effectively reduces them to what I've called "debating clubs." The forums are the closest thing we've got to a platform for public discourse, but an utterly minute percentage of residents participate here, and a very small percentage of those get involved in these kinds of discussion. The SL blogosphere has contracted enormously over the years, and is dominated by (as you've said yourself) fashion blogs. By all means, let's have in-world discussions, or threads here concerning interesting issues. I myself partake in, and even sponsor, both. But without the kind of reach required to make this a truly public discourse, it's really all rather pointless at one level. This breed of intelligentsia is neither influencing, nor being guided by, the public they are supposedly serving.
  23. Scylla Rhiadra
    Fair enough. I'm wondering how useful the commentary of those who are not active members of the community is, though. As I noted somewhere above, I've known a great many educators in SL -- people who are "actual professors" as you put it, and who moreover are here because they have or had an interest in the kinds of potential that VWs has to offer to educators. (The answer, at the moment is, I think, not much, or at best, a highly specialized set of cases.) An awful lot of them never wander far from their campuses or regions. Many of them still use system avatars or ancient mesh: they take something like a perverse pride, some of them, in not participating in things like avatar customization, SL consumerism, RP, club life, etc. They are "on" the platform, but really not "of" it, and their understanding, not merely of what SL actually "is," but also of what it can be, is necessarily limited. How much more limited are the perspectives of "intellectuals" who've never been on the platform at all? How useful are the ruminations of those who have thought deeply about the theory of VW, VR, and "the Metaverse," but who have no conception of how it can play out in actuality? Somewhat useful, maybe . . . (One of the most interesting scholarly studies of SL I've ever read was a PhD thesis on the subject of consumerism in SL -- I know the woman who wrote it, so I was privileged to read it, and attend her public lecture before her defense. She was someone who did know SL very well, as she "lived" in it for about 3 years and explored a great deal -- but her thesis, for probably evident reasons, glossed rather lightly over the relationship of sexuality to consumerism.)
  24. Scylla Rhiadra
  25. Scylla Rhiadra
    Love this! Great use of overlays, June!
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