North Star Writers Group

Nearly seven million people around the world have a virtual counterpart, known as an avatar, who inhabits a cyberspace dimension called Second Life. I recently joined their ranks to find out what all the commotion is about.

Now I am twice as confused as I was before I went digital. I have yet to figure out how to maneuver my avatar through cyberspace or meet anyone else in the virtual community. That’s not surprising. I don’t own (and don’t want) a cell phone or an MP3 player or a PDA, and only last year learned to IM (instant message). I’m like – not just so yesterday – but so hopelessly Jurassic.

I wasn’t always so technologically feral. Back in the late 1970s I was writing and editing electronically, and in the early 1980s I was using a data network to e-mail colleagues around the country. I’ve had a desktop computer in my home since 1983, before most people had one at the office.

These days, I relish my role as relic. If recent media reports are even half accurate, it appears that Second Life’s digital dominion is just as fraught with danger and darkness as the hardcopy version. According to The Washington Post, one Second Life avatar reportedly raped another earlier this year. Another user posted to her Second Life blog her disgust at finding herself next to an underage sex club. Other avatars apparently act out sexual fantasies that include child abuse.

Why is this news? Do we really think we can escape from ourselves by fleeing to the virtual world? That’s virtual, not virtuous. We cannot change our essential selves merely by donning a digital mask. Having said that, I do not believe we human beings are inherently evil or malicious. I do know we are inherently wounded, emotionally and spiritually, and all of us live and act out of these deep-seated injuries in ways that mystify us as much as anyone else.

Out of these inner wounds, we feel empty, isolated, alienated, powerless, unloved, unworthy. We then seek out drug highs or sexual encounters, however humiliating, simply so we will feel something – anything – instead of that terrifying inner void. No doubt part of the lure of Second Life and other simulated worlds is the driving desire for greater control over events and situations than is possible in “real” life.

If that is the attraction, then it really is an illusion, as is the belief in control. Witness the United States’ real-life experience in Iraq. Our current administration invaded that nation under the hubristic delusion that our military might was enough to determine the outcome. Yet the humble improvised explosive device (IED), in the hands of a cunning and ruthless opposition, has made it impossible for the world’s lone superpower to stage-manage events. Perhaps this country was never in as much control of anything as some of us liked to imagine.

Iraq - and Second Life - offer many lessons for those wise enough to heed them. Control is an illusion cherished most by those who feel hopelessly out of control of their lives. And a Second Life is an interesting experience, but one life at a time appears to be more than most of us can handle.

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