separating truth from reality
This has been brewing for a while. It's a kind of reflection about what I find most interesting right now in technology, and why. It's pretty rough, is probably fairly swiss-cheesed, and you should be glad I took out the references to Plato. But if I were the kind of person who was invited to speak at conferences, this is probably what I'd talk about. Feel free to heckle from the floor.
TRUTH, FICTION, REALITY AND MAGIC
"In my view, most authors do not write to reflect reality but to invent a second world with a complicated set of rules – the more complicated the better. Though this second world is derived from the first, it is somehow more meaningful, more satisfying, than the real world. If I can accomplish that – if I can visit this imaginary second world and write a few paragraphs, I feel so much self-respect, and so much happier" -- Orhan Pamuk
What is true and what is real are not the same thing.
Camouflage, for example, is both real and a lie. A report on a football match is true but not the same real experience as watching the game.
I've been spending a while pondering truth, reality, fiction and the virtual, where they interact, and how.
Let's start with some definitions. These aren't dictionary definitions, but more an outlining of parameters.
For starters, my concept of Truth: something that is what it appears to be, with no deliberate dishonesty.
There's plenty of imprecision there to get the semiologists on my doorstep, but I'll fight them off with a broom, the bastards. Of course everything is much more than it appears, and of course there's always some level of dishonesty in everything - however, for our uses today, let's assume things that are True are where there is no deliberate falsehood involved. Fiction, on the other hand, is a deliberate construct of fabrication, for whatever reason. I'll get to a variable scale of this later, so just place this in your satchel and accept it. Examples later on will help.
Next one: something that is real inherently contains unpredictability. Numbers aren't real – they always add up the same, every time, because they're an abstract concept. But one kitten in a billion might have two heads. That's what makes reality interesting. And its state changes. The concept of the number 6 can't be altered by fire, rain, gravity or screaming at it really loudly. But a car, a rock, a small dog can be. And these concepts hold true for reality online – yes, there is such a thing under this definition at least. I'll come back to that in a bit.
Remember, these are useful definitions entirely for the purpose of helping my head, so pedants can join the semiologists on the doorstep, I'm not going to let you in today. To make my definition of reality clearer, for now I'm going to use the word 'static' in the place of 'unreal', and 'fluid' instead of 'real'. But be aware that I'm mouthing 'real' each time I use those words.
That's the messy part done. Now let's have a graph. I like graphs. They make me feel like a consultant.
So here's a scale on which to place some of the more interesting uses of technology (and some other things for reference).
Let's start with a leopard.
That's easy. A leopard is both real and true. It just is. Well done that leopard.
How about a novel? A book itself is as real as a leopard. But how about the story? That sits in the other corner. It is neither true, nor can be affected by anything that anyone does or says. It is predictable, in that its state cannot be changed, no matter what you do to it. It exists, whether book is destroyed or not, as an abstract concept.
Right there also sits stories told on radio, film, even theatre. They may be up there performing the story for real, but the story itself continues to the same conclusion every night, unless it's improv, or they're drunk.
And newspaper content, generously assuming only minor bias in their telling, goes up there.
Literary magazines like Granta would hover between the two, depending on the article. (I won't bother to animate the gif, flick your eyes up and down if it helps).
Right, now you've got the gist, let's move into some choppier waters. Let's start placing software on the map.
Word processors, spreadsheets, and so forth, belong up there with newspaper content. Let's use the broad term utilities. Although we can put anything into them, as software they are, essentially, a one player game. Although I'm convinced some mornings that my computer hates me, in theory everything it does is entirely logic-based. Yeah, you, computer. But don't think I'm not watching.
Speaking of one-player games, let's put them in too. Conventional one-player games have no impact on the fluid (real) world, or vice versa beyond button bashing. Playing a game is a test of skill and logic. And no, I don't care how clever your AI routine is. A non-player character (NPC) will follow certain rules, and competing against one can never be the same as against a real person, because you're not in it for the same thing. The NPC has an unlimited amount of time and patience to keep playing. We, or at least I, don't. The stakes are very different.
But what about online, massively multiplayer games? Let's start with something like World of Warcraft (WoW).
It's an entirely fictional world of course. You look like an orc. I look like a rather foxy elf. I've said too much.
The game is placed more towards fluid than one-player games because the game is built for you to play alongside real people. And real people are, well, real and could do anything when they appear in game – start dancing, disconnect, go for chicken.
It's not even further along the fluid path, because there are set paths to follow in-world if you play the game properly.
But then who does only play the game properly, apart from doorstep-sitting pedants and semiologists? If it really is the new golf (Private Eye, take note), then perhaps we should adapt our graph a little.
This is a shifted in two directions from the intentions of the game's creators, because not only are we becoming less predictable (and more real), but also we're interacting in a more realistic way. You may still be an orc, I may still have long sexy ears, but we've got beyond that now.
Here's an interesting quote, from the 28/04/06 podcast of New Scientist:
"For the online dating sites, they're going to have to improve a lot if people are going to start relying on them. Although you are exposed to a big pool of people, the devil is in sorting them out. That actually seems to work better inside the games [such as Second Life], where people have shared experiences together and go out and do things, whereas the online dating thing is more like a catalogue of someone's hobbies, which doesn't seem to be a good predictor of chemistry. I think that dating sites need to create an experience a little more like the virtual world rather than just a catalogue of hobbies." Celeste Biever, New Scientist technology reporter. That is her name, honest.
On my scale, a shared experience is real, even if it happens in a virtual world that isn't very true to life. Just as messing around in WoW is going to lead to experiences that feel more real than following the set narratives, because they're more surprising/random, and are peopled by unpredictable characters, not NPCs.
Ms Beaver there mentioned Second Life (SL), a virtual world where there is no preset narrative, and the rules of the world are more flexible. Of course, as with anything on or offline, each person will be as truthful as they want to be, but I'm going to mark it on the graph where its creators designed it be.
It still has a the fictional side – I may not look like an elf there, but I'm definitely not a blonde adonis on the other side of the screen either – but the shared experiences are far more fluid than World of Warcraft. If you nose around, you also find a great deal more connections with truth and reality in its world than in WoW – from book clubs to support groups. Changes in our own world have more impact in-game at SL than they do in WoW. The London bombings were marked by players that same day with a permanent virtual shrine.
So much for the virtual worlds. How about the saviour of writing and the death of all journalism, blogs? On the one hand, you could claim that blogs are as random as people. But look at the structure of how it works. On these terms, blogging is like playing a one-player game with someone sat next to you watching and occasionally throwing in advice about how you're playing. The content itself is fixed, but will sometimes be altered by comments if the player allows it, so let's sit it dead centre as on the border of static/fluid, and give them the benefit of the doubt of, in the main, being someone's truth.
Social groups like Flickr go there too - for all our interaction and commenting and joining of groups, I can't change your picture, only comment on it. What you post could be absolutely anything, but my comment is unlikely to change what's there. As for not being right at the top of the truth scale... slide it up and down there according to bias.
Let's drop a few more things in to make the left hand side a bit less empty.
The big empty top right corner can be filled up too, by lots of things that have come about thanks to the internet. There we can put things like IRC, Wikis, SubEthaEdit (in multiple-user mode). I'm calling Wikipedia mostly truthful. Britannica would score slightly higher on the truth scale, but its content would sit over with Utilities as 100% static.
A few other old favourites to drop in, for fun: 419s, ARGs.
How pretty. So where am I going with this?
A short diversion:
When I was about ten years old, I had a book about spies. It came with a small magnifying glass made of paper, and instead of glass it had an eye of red plastic. When placed at various innocuous-looking points in the book, the plastic filter would reveal hidden messages and drawings.
I loved that magnifying glass, because it revealed a hidden world that was as real as the rest of the book, and yet I couldn't see any of that world without the glass. It was all about having the tools of perception.
Unlike dogs, we can't create an accurate map of smells. Unlike pit vipers, we can't see in infra-red. We need tools to perceive worlds that exist outside of our own senses. These worlds are fluid, real – and invisible without the right technology.
And yet most technology, including all the things I've talked about so far, focuses on a limited real world experience that exists through two senses only: sight and hearing. Touch, taste and smell currently play little or no part in seeing and interpreting other worlds outside our own conventional ones, be they true or false, static or fluid (we touch keyboards, mice, paper, but receive no variable feedback that changes the story within).
We increasingly depend on two-dimensional displays and, to a lesser extent, sound to see into other worlds.
Let's go back a second, clear the graph and start again.
My fluid reality isn't yours.
That's not just a metaphysical statement – my phone is vibrating in my pocket, telling me that someone is trying to contact me, whereas you, sitting next to me, are completely unaware of it.
I might look like I'm waving at you – but in fact I'm playing with my EyeToy.
Soon enough, if people like Nick pull their finger out, my phone camera may be like my spy magnifying glass – passing its phonecam lens over real-world objects might reveal virtual notes or graffit-e mapped onto real locations, virtual objects GPS-placed on actual co-ordinates in virtual maps. And only me and people on my friends list can see them.
All of this occupies the more interesting (to me) end of the graph, where all of the things that made us excited about the internet sit too. These are things that are fluid and real, and may be true or false, from GIS to the technology equivalent of psychogeography (psychotechnology?).
This is where things happen. You can augment objects with microchips all you like, but that's nowhere near as interesting as augmenting reality itself.
Anyone who works in this area is liable to make my brain ache in a very good way. Zachary Liebermann's one of them, and I was lucky enough to see him do his stuff last weekend in Madrid (though I left before he put the pack of Mento's in the Coke bottle. Is there a flickr feed for people who do that?).
In Drawn, real paint hits paper, and is photographed. He then removes the paper, and the image remains on the screen. He moves his hands on top of the virtual/real image on the screen – and then proceeds to move the paint using his fingers. He make it fly, force the paint blobs to sing and spin and interact.
Using variations in his software, the tunes change, the paint runs, the objects act and react in different ways, but it's all live and unpredictable and manual. No controller interface necessary.
The next stage is that every object could have its own inner music, a kind of Kirlian Aural. If he adapted his software, he could point the camera at your face, and you'd hear how your features sound. Real objects, virtually augmented.
It's a trick of course, a stage magician using software instead of top hats. But it's also more than that. It's an illusion anyone can participate in, and each time will be completely different. The software is a tool with no defined, static narrative. The illusion is also the creation of a reality similar to, but not quite like ours. It has most of the same rules, and we can inhabit it and do what we like, just as in the real world – but not everything is as we've come to expect.
The magic zone where the multiverse theory will be made true by our own hands. All the things I like most about technology, that make my head hurt and make me see life in a new way, from Wikis to 419s, have come from somewhere in that zone. We can create subtly different versions of our world, certain laws of reality left as they are, and others built differently, changed, rethought and made new or made fluid. All possible combinations could be built, visible through the window of a screen, or slowly creeping into our own three-dimensional space. Edward Castronova has spoken about using real people in virtual worlds to model economic theory. There's magic in his methods, too. In fact, anyone who is building on new universes based on our own for whatever application is a magic-maker, giving us new ways of looking at the world through their own particular adaptation.
Call it the seven levels of perception, the multiverse theory, or just playing around. I'm now going to alter my graph.
The closer we get to fluid, or real, the more that truth and fiction are themselves fluid. The truth/fiction axis no longer applies because every moment in a new level of perceived reality will occupy somewhere different on it. This acts according to a real world law. That doesn't. This is my face. That is my face's song. Different realities, built to specification and then left to run riot. What starts with logic ends in chaos. We build our narratives as we go along.
As a journalist, story teller, reader and writer, that's what makes me excited in technology right now. Just like when watching the best illusionists, the wonderful moments come when you can't see the join.