Philip Finds His Voice But Do We Lose Ours?

The loneliness of the long-distance voicer...

Philip Linden found his voice yesterday.

But have we lost ours?

First, a brief on the yawning digital divide...the divide that divides us not yearly or weekly but hourly.

All of this happened at the Town Hall with the new format -- Philip talked in voice-over audio, and people with Skype were able to call him up on a kind of radio station and ask him questions, even have a conversation back and forth with him, and he answered. Nothing THAT new, but it was considered a breakthrough because trying to wire up all this stuff through crashy, laggy SL is a real chore and technical challenge, but it more or less worked.

But...Something gained, something lost.

In the old days before the Lindens put Voice into the world, I had a friend who had a friend who I'd see around sometimes with an interesting avatar. I didn't know anything about him. I knew his beautiful work in the world, and I could see his interestly-outfitted avatar, which changed now and then. I had no idea actually whether he was "he" or "she" in RL or where he was or what languages were his native languages.

But now I know something about him that he might have preferred simply to leave off his second-life and first-life "resume" on his avatar profile: he's deaf. He can't hear.

Before yesterday, we were all equals, and we all typed, and we all spoke and we all heard.

Now, he can't hear a town hall -- unless of course somebody keeps a running transcript for him. That can be done, but what can't be done is the yawning divide. A sim crack opened up, and some people were on one private island and floated out to sea, and left the others behind. A world that was *supposed to be* about being "better" and removing differences, veiling differences, erasing differences between people based on national origin, race, status, disability -- has had its fabric torn. Maybe torn badly.

I could put in here a long aside about those who aren't hearing impaired, but what you might call *cough* gender-impaired. That is, if anybody had the opposite gender in their avatar, they'd be a bit reluctant to have voice turned on because it would be unable to conceal their gender. Once everybody in public heard a booming male bass voice coming out of that petite flitting little fairy with the filmy, gauzy wings -- her cover would be blown, it would be 10 times harder get everybody to believe in her fairy-tude again...But I don't wish to trivialize my first point.

But...it's not only other categories of people who might like to avoid voiced -- one obvious category is people for whom English is not a first language, and they don't wish to have any accent betray their locations, nationality, origins, etc. I should they'd especially like to avoid coming on with a British accent, revealing to all the Americans who hate Brits the real reason for their fucktard behaviour on the forums, or coming on with an American accent, and revealing to all the Brits who hate Americans the real reason for their sheer stupidity in working the game. And so forth and so on. Call it one more fabric torn -- some people playing in this world with the stage curtains very heavily veil'd o'er the scene already spend a good deal of the "game" trying to tear it back to see what the person "really is" in real life where they are often presumed to have "no life" -- and all this does is make it easier for them.

Richard Bartle wrote a famous essay about these issues for Game Girl Advance:

The context was a bit different -- the importance of trying to suspend belief in MMORPGs. But some of the principles apply...it's an essay that despite its date is still linked on GGA because it is still debated including by Bartle himself at various conferences.

"If you introduce reality into a virtual world, it's no longer a virtual world: it's just an adjunct to the real world. It ceases to be a place, and reverts to being a medium. Immersion is enhanced by closeness to reality, but thwarted by isomorphism with it: the act of will required to suspend disbelief is what sustains a player's drive to be, but it disappears when there is no disbelief required.

Adding reality to a virtual world robs it of what makes it compelling - it takes away that which is different between virtual worlds and the real world: the fact that they are not the real world.

Voice is reality."

Of course, the RL-in-SL people like to turn SL merely into a kind of 3-D resume coat hanger and chat space for their next gig -- the worldness of the world is actually irritating to them.

They'll be the first to say voice is not new in SL. Lots of people have been using Team Speak and Skype and any other program that might be out there to work in groups and avoid those long stupid mad typing sessions where you sit on a prim chair and wait for your fellow avatar to get done waving his hands over an imaginary typewriter. This can take FOREVER. Sometimes people start...type..you hear the typing noise the Lindens have obsessively laid on to the sound track of SL...they keep typing...they remind me of that hilarious scene in that movie was it with Tom Hanks where he goes to the airline reservation desk and the lady types for like 20 minutes frantically in front of the screen and then says...the flight is completely booked. More often than not when that happens in SL it's because someone's game has crashed and their avatar remains connected to the server until unlogged.

Voice can help people building a sim or managing a club or running a RL-related medium -- it moves things faster, people hear tonalities, possibly they trust one another. That's they theory anyway.

The greatest thing about Voice for SL, of course, is that it will remove that last vestigial need to do any typing whatsoever during cybersex. You can just click once on the Play-Sexy device, then hands-free, talk on your Skype...if indeed any talking will need to be done.

But now...a word from our sponsors! The hyperflute! Before Philip was able to work all the levers to get on the air, somebody put on a hyperflute, some kind of electronic music-playing device sold inworld for a few hundred dollars. That advertisement sure assured THAT avatar some traffic and sales...and no doubt other FIC Power Hour aspiring ad-buyers are thinking of the potential with things like Hermia Linden's Tinies skin to Robin Linden's new gorgeous new red hair-do (gosh, I love red-heads, and that hair that is very subtly placed in ringlet curls without any of that hard-edged hoochie-hair look is really yummy -- who made that hair? they should get traffic too!).

Now back to our studio, folks.

Why did we move to voice? Well, in part it was because it turns out that Philip can't type. You know how they have these conversations in offices about really good-looking women they want to hire as secretaries until someone says...but can she type?

That was one problem. But a more urgent one was just the sheer wealth of information and nuances that Philip wants to get across these days that are hard to deliver in cramped half-sentence staccato bulletins. Of course, he could make the IM interface in SL 180 percent more user-friendly with softer edges, more space, and more features like it has in TSO, but that would be going in the not-cool direction of user-help instead of bleeding technology.

Yet listening to his voice-over of more than an hour, I couldn't hear what any new headlines are. There was no news. The same-old, same-old of "Havoc One and a Half...Still Coming!"  "Lincoln Still Dead!"

Still, the telling little asides are all part of building the knowledge base one needs to live in this world.

 

For one, Philip, CEO of Linden Lab, and Mayor of this Global Village, sounds TIRED. It must be one HELL of big job running that server farm with the 6000 people on it at any one time!

Then, there was the back and forth that some of the questioners got, that was permissible because they called in to Philip on Skype, and Jeska wasn't in between merely stripping out their questions if they weren't griefers, and they got to talk to the man directly.

So true to form as an engineer, Philip would tend to say, well, ok, great idea, but what's your plan for that? Where's the to-list? Tell me your voting proposal number.

Voting proposal number.

Wow.

That was the most scary part of this town hall. And if you thought THAT was scary...if you kept listening...you'd hear that Philip also knew by heart the numbers of other proposals and just pulled them up out of the ether in the discussion.

He reads the dumb voting proposals and knows their numbers. So those with ears to hear will listen, and get busy not only making voting proposals, but telling Il Chefe their numbers.

You know, I almost don't know where to start on this one, there are so many things wrong with it, but I'll start with the question I typed to Jeska (after battling with her for 10 minutes where she kept *answering my question herself* and not passing on the question, interspersed with those plasticine electronic customer-service smiles the Lindens beam at you:
: )
: )
: )
"I'm Customer Relationship Manager Linden, May I Help You? : ) : ) : )

FINALLY I framed a question she couldn't answer, so she passed it to El Presidente.

"Why can't we vote 'no' on the voting section on the web page?"

Philip sounded a little bit startled by the question but answered that he and Robin could think about it. Maybe it would make sense.

Of course, I know there are deep layers of conscious or unconscious ideologies at work here that explain why Cory Linden didn't code the ability to say "no" on the feature voter...but we need to keep asking and asking that question.

I don't want to live in a country where I can't vote "no".

The Lindens keep trying to make me live in a platform where I upgrade to optimal positive reinforcement status various proposals that reach a critical level of positivity as others slowly drift down to less critical levels of positivity due to their inability to attract positive-reinforcement yes-clicking mouses within a sufficient window of avatar response-time related to retinal-lock-ratios.

But I definitely want to skip over that forced-march gunky tech stuff that is based on the same ideologies of Google and Slash.dot and Wikipedia and just push at you what some code-is-lawster is pushing on you, and I definitely want to vote "no".

No.

When the Lindens can see a flashmobbed proposal that attracted, say, 327 votes for p2p, they should also see that if there are 536 votes AGAINST it that they have to give some thought about how to phase and implement the thing that they and their friends are excited about.

These Lindens always think they're going to be able to avoid and skip over RL politics and representational institutions. They think by just collecting server data and fixing various sliders and options and user interfaces that you can get government-on-a-prim.

Philip has found his voice, to be sure. But we've lost ours, even if we can fight our way past the filters of Jeska, the Second Cast, the tekkie handling the call-in number or the Skype address.

Before, in the Golden Age of Lindenor, all our questions on the forums, put in the threads, were asked of Philip. People doubt this now, and the people trying to take over the waves are lying about and spinning this now, but in fact our questions in the forums threads were indeed put before Philip.

More to the point, any questions that developed in the room during the meeting were visible, and his answer was visible.

A perfect transcript was instantly created by pressing 'select all' on "chat history".

 

Now all of that is gone -- our voice is lost.

Now, faceless avatars/tekkies/Lindens will filter the questions and relay them to Philip. Well, in part that's life in the big city. RL radio shows work that way. If President Bush does a Fireside Chat you don't get to just call him up directly and bitch at him directly.

In SL, though, we are still small enough of a town at about 6000 people logged on at any one time that knowing everybody else's business, and seeing what fucktards they are on the forums and sometimes inworld, we can't trust some of them if they get at the mike and run the show.

I think voicing helps the Lindens more than it helps us, because we aren't as easily voiced. Tekkies are scornfully and witheringly blasting non-tekkies for their failure to just download Skype for $0 and pick up some cheap pair of headphones. Yeah, I used to have Skype but turned it off eventually, it was too great a distraction.  Headphones, sure. Great. But...someone has to manage the uptake, and you can be sure by next broadcast Johnny Ming will have changed his Skype address, citing "griefers" -- which will also eliminate the ordinary person's right to know a publicly-accessible 1-800 style call-in number to a show.

What's clear from this exercise is that lots of different communication channels need to be opened up for feedback to the rulers in Second Life.

Gwyn Llewelyn would like to have these "interpreters" of the world just "emerge" and just "take power" -- in systems like the ResMod.

People who take power in that fashion don't have social legitimacy, however, whatever their attraction within a narrow circle of elites.

Traxx Hathor would just like to mute and filter out anybody who doesn't seem to be worthy of being "in our channel" and be done with them -- execute them at dawn if need be:

"To the extent that this is indeed a communications medium we can stifle malefactors by refusing to supply them with bandwidth on valuable high signal-to-noise communications channels. For example, on an individual level I like the mute function. It lets an individual explicitly choose to pay no attention to a time-wasting troublemaker such as an IM-stalker. On a group level those who own a communications channel like a forum are under no obligation to provide costly bandwidth to everybody who wants it. It makes sense to ignore those with a track record of grabbing way more than their share of bandwidth to use for self promotion and denigrating whoever is on their hate-list. In both of these cases the owner of the bandwidth is making the decision based on first hand knowledge; it's not some overarching institution doing system-wide enforcement."

This sort of paragraph assumes so much -- that there is a panel of experts who have agreed who is "denigrating"; that the "hate-list" is in fact a hate list and not perhaps merely a small group of people who in fact are hogging the airwaves themselves. An overarching institution creates law that is accessible to all against which they can see how actions are interpreted. The so-called "first-hand knowledge" is inevitably biased and the aggregate of a little elite clump's "first-hand knowledge" is not acceptable to me or the next guy with *different* first-hand knowledge.

I'm going to have to think a lot more about how you can create information channels in this soup -- one hope is that there will be many podcasters, or least 2 more than Johnny Ming and his pals from completely different worlds. Those operating Internet radios they use mainly for music and entertainment have to think a lot more about how they grapple with politics and not leave it to be merely "weather on the ones".

The townhall genre itself is limited, and it's now literally been turned on its ear, and transmogrified into a talk show.

But we need more than just talk shows -- we probably need more do-shows from our Lindens by having them come inworld much more and do focus-groups. I know it's wear-and-tear on them, but they can evaporate about 30 percent of the hatred and static about their incomprehensible decisions and policies if they just *show up* and listen -- not even talk.

Comments

[Brace]

Good article Prokovy. "Voice is Reality." I like that too.

I guess today I'm just saddened. I feared this day would come, but not so soon. I can't even begin to tell you how upset one of my Partners is right now.

There's been so many events and even classes where I've had to type out whats going on, so she could participate.

People have been resorting to voice on their own in many different ways, but to have it start getting sanctioned like this from "on high" is very disturbing to me.

I'll have to find out if LL has more that 15 employees, if so then I'm starting paperwork regarding the ADA. I'm not Katywiki, but it just so happens I know this legislature inside and out.

Most likely it doesn't apply here, but it might do some good to have philly slap his eyes on it anyhow, since he obviously isn't thinking as globally as he thinks he is.

[Prokofy Neva]

Seeing threads like this on voice vs. text:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=98810&page=3&pp=15

I can see this is shaping up to be one of those endless debates like "cloth vs. disposable diapers" or "telehub vs. p2p" that will never be won or lost.

My overall takehome from this right now is:

Um...Philip can't type, so Robin has to???

THAT's progress??? This sounds like an office in 1956 with the boss saying the girl's pretty...but can she type?

I'm amazed that Philip is claiming he answered *more* questions. I don't know what psychological/perceptually happened to make him think/feel that. You only have to look at the transcript to see that in fact he didn't. I went to the store at one point and came back 15 minutes later and was astounded to see hardly any questions moved. That's because some overdriving types got to chat and shine on and do their whole star-fucker dance to impress the Lindens -- at least with type, you cut and paste.

It's funny to me how no one seems to get my point about FEEDBACK. When there is a typed list of questions on the forums, everybody knows the input into Philip. When he types, everybody can see the output and scroll back. So even in using voice, they need to preserve that FEEDBACK quality.

They can do it by keeping 2 sets of group IMs going, manned by 2 Lindens or Johnny's assistants.

In one group IM, the typists congregate and Typist Linden types the transcript. They watch the group IM, which they've configured not to intersperse with room chat on their edit/preferences -- that way they have a surgical field clear in which they can see the all-important one's transcribed remarks without the peanut gallery.

In another Group IM -- you join that group just for that meeting, then it disbands possibly -- you might even rotate it and let only one time membership for 90 days or something -- you have the Skype callers. Then somebody preps them and prevents them from knocking their pen on the microphone and squealing IS THIS ON? AM I LIVE? OHH WOOWW HI PHIL HI MOM!

In both these group chats there is FEEDBACK which consists of Jeska or whoever saying "That question was already asked" (which also can be SEEN by following the chat) or "that's similar -- can we cluster those 2?"

At a certain point also Jeska could say, sorry, time's up, we have only so much air time, try again next time. I'm pretty confident that if they tighten up the management of the question process and answer process they'll actually be hurting for questions, or at least have enough.

I would also urge Torley or whomever to *leave the room chat typists alone*. Let the chat. Let them talk to their heart's content. Let them shine, do star turns, impress their friends, call out funny jokes to the guy who's droning away in Voice -- it's the only way. Let it be free. It's absolutely cost-free to let it be free.

No need for special coloured Linden text -- bleh, stupid. Just put the entire thing into a group IM. Use Group IMs. All groups in SL trying to accomplish something use them to good advantage, chiefly because they sort out room chat, IMs, etc. into a separate box to focus on.

[The Eels]

"I'll have to find out if LL has more that 15 employees, if so then I'm starting paperwork regarding the ADA. I'm not Katywiki, but it just so happens I know this legislature inside and out."

Are you high? I mean, really. Do you file ADA provisions against political rallies that don't have sign language handlers? What about local town halls? Village council meetings?

SL is entertainment; this isn't life-or-death stuff.

If you file a motion for this, I'm immediately filing another motion accusing LLab of discriminating against blind people. Because, you know. You can't read text IF YOU CANT FUCKING SEE.

Sheesh.

[Prokofy Neva]

I see no harm in Brace researching the application of the ADA. Of course, we're not in America here. We're on some kind of pet rock in the sky -- some indeterminate place where the laws don't apply, and maybe can't apply. If LL found itself fending off lawsuits under the ADA or any torts claims they'd probably go under, or cease functioning. They recently changed their TOS to call themselves a "common carrier". I'm not sure if that means they are something like a public bus that has to provide disabled access -- maybe only in some states -- and they are mainly only a state of mind right now.

I don't think ultimately lawsuits, claims, torts, etc. are the way to go with Linden Lab. I think they won't work, aren't effective for any kind of even rhetorical/media value, and will only make them expel you from their game, which they can do "at any time or any reason or no reason".

I think rather you either need to stay with them and try to engage them and keep them challenged with things like that but simultaneously offer them the solutions of how they could fix it. Once they have someone who can type faster than Robin, as pretty as she is, and who can organize the transcription process more coherently, it won't be at issue. I agree that you shouldn't have to wait for the summary record or transcription.

Yet a lot of the world functions with only part translation or captions -- it's sad that accommodations can't always be made for the deaf or those for whom English isn't a first language, but people are trying here. Robin immediately went to work typing furiously, as did others -- and I think they deserve a round of applause for that, not a lawsuit.

There are many troubling things about this voice/text thing that they sprung on us with absolutely no prior discussion. I guess they feel they need to have voice just like, I dunno, X-Box, Final Fantasy or WoW users tend to have voice.

[T_S_Kimball]

I suppose they could always hire someone who happens to have experience as a court reporter, or Business Shorthand (gods, does *anyone* still teach that?).

Anyway, this is why I had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth the first few times I tried There. The free account had no voice support, and it was instantly apparent - in the way they set it up - that those folks would be a set of 'have-nots.' Mind you, the voice support and all the other basic stuff came for US$10 so in theory the *real* There starting account is the same as an original SL Basic. *shrug*

--TSK/Alan