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

Virtual Nation: Civilizing the Digital Wilds

Image by Greg Bayles. CC BY 2.0 Generic.

Adapted from Jastrow's public domain photograph.

1. Working Thesis Statement
The Internet represents the heir apparent to the cultural and social wealth of the American 'Empire' and will ultimately serve as a crucible for new, transcultural, digital civilizations.

2. Preliminary Exploration

I've explored the concept of virtual civilizations in a number of posts:

• Digital Nations: The New Frontier takes a look at the historical inheritance of cultural/social wealth that in part led to the rise of the Roman, British, and American 'Empires.' It looks forward to the rise of the digital nation from the cultural and social infrastructure of America. This is essentially my first focused exploration of the concept of digital nations and represents my earliest thinking on the matter.
• Monuments of our Age: Foundations of Civilization in the Digital World addresses the concept of civilization from a historiological perspective, examining the requirements for civilization and providing a number of scholarly definitions for civilization in a modern context.
• We the People: Digital Civilizations is the post that I've used for most of my social proof, because it provides a brief overview of the topic and presents some foundational evidence as to the foundations of civilization already exigent within virtual worlds. This post received a good amount of feedback, and it's been one that I've circled back to at various points. This was also my first real call for colonization of the digital wilds: "Rather than anathematizing video games and virtual realms as base and 'savage,' we need settlers who will actively shape the digital frontier for good. Rather than complaining that digital worlds are mindless and violent, maybe we need to be the ones to find out how we can make them thoughtful and exalting."

Virtual Civilizations: Settling the Digital Wilds

"The British Settlers of 1820 Landing 

in Algoa Bay" (1853), by Thomas Baines

Well, I wanted to do a video to summarize some of the points that I'm going to be hitting in my research project, but time got the best of me, so for now, it'll have to be just an outline. I'll hopefully get to do a video next week sometime (or maybe tomorrow, if the gods smile upon me). So anyway, here we go with the outline. If you have thoughts or suggestions, please leave them in the comments below! Thanks!

Introduction

     -Historical Perspective

               Inheritance of cultural/infrastructural wealth from larger nation (U.S.)

               Requirements for a civilization: what is a civilization?

     -Working Thesis: The Internet represents the heir apparent to the cultural and social wealth of the                     American 'Empire' and will ultimately serve as a crucible for new, digital civilizations.

Digital Governance
     -Already taking root among digital communities
               Bitcoin nation
               EVE Online representative council
               Confederation of Democratic Simulators
     -True Democracy
     -Opt-in citizenship
Virtual Economies
     -Fiat currency
     -Flow of money out of real economy and into digital economies
     -Bitcoin and other digital currencies
     -Interconnectedness of the two markets: hyperinflation, devaluation of yuan, etc.
Arts in the Digital Age
     -Arts exploration
               Harlem Renaissance
               Scottish Highlands
               St. Andrews
               Museums
               Roman Ruins
     -Player-authors: crafting our own worlds
Settling the Digital Wilds (Conclusion)

     -Monuments of our Age

     -William McGaughey: primary institution of power is the internet

     -Call for virtual settlers

Two Can Play at This Game

After Greg rained info on me like mana from heaven, I've taken it as a personal challenge to respond in kind. Here we go, +Greg Bayles. Have some stuff on digital civilizations/nations and virtual worlds.

Digital Nations:

This article is a chapter from this book that deals more with privacy, but also suggests that Facebook deserves a constitution, especially since David Cameron (Prime Minister of the UK) met with Mark Zuckerberg as if he were a head of state.

This is a reddit user's attempt to make a whole constitution for the "Digital Nation."

Virtual Worlds:

This image is from Gary's Mod which I found from this reddit thread where a lot of users talk about how they've "lived" inside the game. In addition to going to a bar to watch professional gamers play another game from inside the game, people have read the entire Lord of the Rings series, watched whole movies, and more.

This article is about the upcoming EverQuest Next, a game which is actually two games presented in two phases. The first phase is EverQuest Next Landmark, where players will be free to establish towns, settlements, cities, etc. to establish the world, then when that phase is done and enough of the world is built, they'll start the real MMORPG of fighting and stuff, but you can still build things too.

Monuments of our Age: Foundations of Civilization in the Digital World

 Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike 2.0
By Greg Bayles, graphic remixed from Mary Harrsch

Last week, I posted a bunch of my curation findings as to digital civilizations specifically. This week, however, I've been working to flesh out my research in terms of the requirements for civilization to exist, and I've had some pretty good success through both social and more traditional modes of inquiry. On Monday, I posted to my Facebook and Google+ profiles asking for people's insights as to the foundational elements of civilization. Google+ didn't yield a ton--just a post from my sister--but I was able to start up a rather healthy conversation on Facebook and got a lot of insights from friends, especially those studying political science, history, and anthropology.

You can check out the conversation below if you prefer to just read through the responses (I personally like the one about chocolate-covered almonds), but to sum up the arguments, my friends gravitated toward five or six main points:

1. Social surplus (extra resources)
2. Unified sense of culture
3. Code of law
4. Cohesive economic system
5. Territory (according to the UN)
6. A population (a more obvious but nonetheless essential component)

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.

Google Alerts: the Now, the What, the Who

I've been looking into Google Alerts as a curation tool of late, as I wrote in a recent blog post, but I wanted to throw some thoughts out there as to its usefulness and some of the things that I've found .

My general impression is that I'm very impressed. I've used Google Alerts before to monitor people, but I've never really approached it topically, and I have to say, I've really been missing out on a valuable tool. I put up three alerts (queries) on Thursday and have been receiving daily updates on "digital worlds," "virtual worlds," and "virtual civilizations," and while I've gotten a few things that were less applicable to my particular area of interest, I've discovered a lot of really interesting recent, meaningful resources and found people with whom I can connect.