g-chastity

I found myself frowning over an uninteresting interview with the founder of Second Life, a virtual world on the web. I spend a lot of time with my imagination, so I understand the Second Life thing. But I also don't get it, in a big way. I'm no luddite, but I'm irritated enough by how much of my First Life hunches and hopes over this mono-sensual machine while my body slowly twists into a distortion further encouraged by the asymmetry of driving a gear-shift.

The problem is you can't crack pistachios while you're typing and you can't share pistachios while you talk on g-chat.

Some time back I tried IM sex with a distant lover. It was a poorly conceived idea, for reasons that are now obvious: it emphasised our isolation at the key (arf) moment.

But it's not only about the logistic difficulties of typing with your hands full. Eating pistachios starts before anything touches the tongue. I like the silky shells and the light, hollow blunt noise they make as they jostle together in your hand (not unlike the clicking of a keyboard). I like all the barely-noticed sensations in the little ritual: the sharp edge of the shell under a fingernail, the pop and that particular haptic give just as the shell gives way.

On g-chat, whatever you're doing or feeling or imagining with whoever, the sensation narrows to the slightly spongy spring and click of smooth keys under ten fingertips. Something seeps through from meat-life. Flirting with the labour historian online used to expand a little balloon behind my ribs (and conveniently left the labour historian blissfully unaware when that sensation failed to unfold). I felt like someone stepped on a ripe plum inside me when the labour historian dumped me by IM. But despite the internal experience, the sensation of the chair was hard as ever, the twinge in my shoulder ever present, and the keys substitute both for tentative reaches and their absence.

And its not only that flat visuals fill in for layers and layers of sensation, texture, smell, and so on, to say nothing of the missing layers of social sensation, gesture and expression. Its that its the same sensation for an impassioned argument with my friend who probably thinks this blog is about him (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8Y-SdE7sFk&feature=fvw). And same again for chit chat with the former housemate about the dog and the shopping.

This is handy enough when emotions would be confusing or distracting. Apparently online communication is quite relaxing if you're autistic - none of those gestural and facial cues to misread. I can't say I've never hidden behind that. But when i get excitable in some discussion, even though the meat-me types faster and less accurately and pulls just as many faces, I feel gagged when I can't work out a way to really scowl in exactly such and such a way through a keyboard.

It's puzzling because I do love writing, and when you write or read you are also focussing your sense world on one sense which anyway becomes with reading merely a channel for transmitting cognition. And of course Second Life is not really a place where you live, but maybe a tool for imagination just like a book.

Some dim-lit dusty corner of my brain makes a spurious connection with Marx's difference between use value and exchange value. It is analogous only regarding abstraction from the concrete, but indulge me anyway. The use of any commodity, Marx says, is built in to its specific, sensuous being in a way that can't be substituted by another thing. I value pistachios because its a joy to be nourished by something so pretty and entertaining and mildly compulsive. My computer has not one of these characteristics and I would never dream of eating it but I value it too because, eish, those little springs under the keys and all the other clever gadgetry, you can do a lot with that. To exchange a computer for pistachios though, we must ignore all of these differences and find some abstract thing shared by little piggies and chairs and tables and pistachious and computers and all the other diverse things which are driven to market.

The spurious analogy is that this keyboard becomes an abstract commonality between all these different virtual social encounters - chatting, fighting, loving, escaping. And I wonder, what is it doing to the way my brain is wired that pleasure, pain, passion and sheer indifference, all these varied internal experiences, are narrowed to a single sensuous experience - the chair as ever hard on my skinny bum, the twinge in the shoulder and the crackle of the keys varied now by the ticking of pistachio debris trapped under the now slightly oily keys?

and that, i suspect, is a signal to get off the fucking chair and go procrastinate in the rest of the world.