Into the Woods

This past summer I read Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. So I have been thinking about his ideas of "intimate immensity" as they pertain to how students (and well, anyone for that matter) sometimes perceive the World Wide Web. The screen about eighteen inches of my face has the lure of such intimate immensity.

Bachelard provides a metaphor of a forest to explain intimate immensity. It is the experience of being surrounded by the trees closest to you, and therefore, unaware of the vastness of the woods beyond this immediate, intimate circle. Perhaps the woods is as Robert Frost tells us "lovely, dark and deep." Or maybe not. Either way we can't see the forest for the trees. We are lured into a coziness, a security of a verdant canopy and steady bark pillars in our intimate vicinity.

Is that not how comfortable I feel as I type this in my own study, with my own familiar computer screen? Is that not how my students feel when they post pictures of their latest OMG moments with their friends? Sure. It's the intimacy of thinking we are talking only among one's "friends" or writing only to oneself that blogging can be.

Still, it's important before clicking "publish" or "upload" to remember ourselves and remind our students that as intimate as the Web may be when it's eighteen inches away or in one's lap, it and our audience may also be vast and unknown. Indeed, there may be a few "lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!"

Fairy tales warn us about dropping breadcrumbs, straying from the path, and talking to wolves. As we tread into the woods of the World Wide Web and invite our students, these cautionary stories and a mindfulness to Bachelard's sense "intimate immensity" can help us find our way safely.



Image: Nicholas T. “Mossy.” Detail. Flickr. 19 March 2007. CC Licensed: BY-SA-NC

Most People Exist, Some Virsist

Oscar Wilde once said, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” We'll now you can have a Second Life. But I'm not sure that's living.

Recently I've seen a promo on television for a program that examines "the effects on people who persist in virtual reality." I've seen the promo twice and can't recall whether it's a news report or special documentary. I get hung up on the phrase "persist in virtual reality." Does VR take persistance?

Well, maybe. Although I can spend clock-spinning time warps flying about in Second Life, I've yet to lose track of major slices of my first life (and I've heard some people have.) Maybe my RAM isn't hyper enough, but my avatar eventually starts freezing up and the program crashes. So persistence is part of it.

Besides being in Second Life is a sort of Oz. "People come and go so quickly here." I wouldn't call it a place to persist.

I just think "persista" is not "exist," and neither is what you do in VR. How about virsist! Persist, exist, virsist--Wilde had it right. Save some time for living.

Image: Avatar in Second Life.