Civilization in the Digital Age: Virtual Spaces and Hybrid Reality

Well, the White Whale is slain. My final paper is done. Soon the Rachel will come round to pick up the surviving orphans from the sea, and I'll go back home to warmth and solitude.

In any case, I decided to include a link to the paper in a .doc format, as I know I hate reading papers like this on blogs. I hope you enjoy!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_oHVteZi_KNWHZsMWxIdUhXQ0U/edit?usp=sharing

We the People: Digital Civilizations

Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 Generic

By Greg Bayles, graphic remixed from Luc Legay

I've been getting more and more interested in the idea of digital civilizations, so I wanted to throw out some of the thoughts that I've had over the past couple of days. Earlier in the week, I completed a book preview on Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken, and while I found a lot of really useful information, I think the most influential for me has been just a couple lines from a NYT book review. William Saletan remarks, "The Internet isn’t heaven. It isn’t hell, either. It’s just another new world. Like other worlds, it can be civilized." Now obviously my interest in digital civilizations predisposed me to be way more excited about this than perhaps the average person, but for me, Saletan's words came as a powerful reminder about a concept that I've held dear for years: we are the creators of our realities.

"Another and still stranger world..."

Ch. 11, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Recently, I wrote a blog post, a Google+ message, and a Facebook plea asking for you to help me choose between research topics, and the tally is in. I'm proud to announce that I'll be researching 'digital worlds unseen'--that is, the digital universes that oft times go completely unnoticed in the 'real' world despite their apparent complexity and outright intrigue.

In light of our study of Moby Dick, this is an especially pertinent topic, for in some sense, the leviathans of Melville's work live in a world that is to us likewise unknown and unseen--a place that's neither understood nor appreciated by the vast majority of people. We perhaps catch a tiny glimpse of that world every now and then in our brief encounters with its strange inhabitants, but we otherwise remain blissfully (and sometimes sanctimoniously) ignorant to these worlds lurking just beneath the threshold of our perception. Well, I want to change that.