Second Life creator Philip Rosedale is supposed to have said: "I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country."(Terdiman, 2006 cited by Alexandra Bal)
What if we take this assertion seriously and consider virtual worlds as countries?
After all, it's not far-fetched to speak of people "living" in virtual worlds. I heard that some people are spending a lot of time in Second Life, even more time there than in their real life. They're building enduring relationships with their assumed identities, some even marrying there and getting pregnant and giving birth, well, to avatars. They are also buying real estate, or should I say virtual estate, in Second Life. (You can see the price of real estate in Second Life in its wikipedia article.) Apparently, just like in the real world, nasty things happen in there too, like a friend of mine said she got raped in Second Life! There's even an academic book published recently about the "culture" in Second Life. Watch some of these clips to have an idea of what's going on in there.
Some people (computer experts who design tradable "items", like the experience of giving birth, in Second Life) are also "working" or making (real) money in Second Life, and of course, we are all familiar with the term "digital economy".
If people like Nicholas Negroponte will have their way, children with access to computers and the internet now will not only be used to the digital economy when they grow up, they will also be completely at ease with "mixed" social realities, i.e., environments in which real people interact not only with other real people (as we are now doing with Skype and Facebook) but also with digital creatures in cyberspace. Bal argues that this is the idea behind the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project that big corporate names like Google and eBay are investing on. One can just imagine what virtual worlds would look like a generation from now! I'm betting it would have well-developed economies, societies and cultures of their own.
If today's virtual worlds, or better yet, tomorrow's virtual worlds were to be treated as countries, then we can speak of "digital migration", can't we? Surely, it is some kind of transnational or circular migration in the sense that people who migrate to digital countries are still connected to their real countries. (Obviously, now, people who "live" in Second Life must still pay their electric bills in the real world; and people who make a living in Second Life are aiming to earn US dollars not Linden dollars.) Most real world migration nowadays involve people keeping loyalties or connections to two or more countries anyway (as opposed to discarding one for another), so the fact that migration to virtual worlds are dependent or tied to real world existence is not an argument against "digital migration".
So here are some wild thoughts:
1. Internet connectivity is not spreading out evenly throughout the world (no thanks to uneven economic development). Digital migration become more common among people in advanced industrialized, or should I say, post-industrial countries.
2. In places like the Philippines where the ratio of computers to households are still relatively low compared to more advanced states, people connect to each other via the cellphone. Sixty-one percent of mobile phone subscribers are in developing countries, according to the UN's telecommunications agency ITU. And for a simple reason, cell phones are cheaper and easier to acquire than land lines in developing countries. Unless virtual worlds move into cellphones as well, digital migration will not be as common in developing countries.
3. Real world migration has become a structural feature of globalization (Castles 2002); it can't be stopped, not with restrictive migration policies, not with militarized borders. Also, what's driving migration is not only underdevelopment, its uneven development. Don't just look at Filipinos who seek overseas contract work; look at the Singaporeans and Malaysians who still leave their relatively more developed countries to live in the United States.
4. Digital and global migration are happening simultaneously. As post-industrial nationals move to their digital countries, migrants move into post-industrial and other developed countries. Well, they need highly skilled technicians to maintain the network of hardware that run their digital countries. They also need an army of workers to clean their real houses, take care of the elderly, lay their fiber-optic cables, not to mention, build the fences that keep the unwanted immigrants out for them while they "live" and "work" in cyberspace. So they need migrants! Hence, as Westerners go virtual, post-colonials will run the real world.
I recently read a eloquently written book entitled "Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization" by A. Aneesh. Yes, an academic has already used the term "virtual migration"!
ReplyDeleteHere is a summary of this book which I wrote for an assignment I did recently:
This is a sociological study of one aspect of globalization, viz., labor migration of highly skilled computer professionals, using Indian programmers who deliver their services to the United States as a case study. The author proposes that labor migration be conceived as taking the form of either the actual movement of laboring bodies across borders (physical migration) or the movement of disembodied labor (virtual migration). (In more orthodox business and economics terminology, the latter would be considered not a form of labor migration, but rather as trade in services, or “outsourcing”.) Physical migration is subject to the opposed forces of, on the one hand, American businesses which demand more Indian programmers, and, on the other hand, nationalist immigration policy (shaped in part by protectionist labor unions) which restricts the same. Virtual migration sidesteps restrictions on physical migration by allowing programmer’s labor to be delivered to the US while they stay put in India. The result are geographically distributed, temporally integrated (either the 24-hour company or the call center) networks of US and Indian computer companies serving American customers. He argues that virtual migration actually results in global labor mobility (in the same sense as global financial mobility) despite the persistence of strong immigration walls. Virtual migration means certain forms of labor have been disembodied, i.e., has taken a digital form, and could therefore, like finance capital, be moved anywhere in an instant. The author also seems to suggest that the limits to what forms of work (and even things) can be disembodied is not fixed and seems to be exceeded further and further as technology progresses. This is possible because of the internet and programming languages which he considers as enabling what he calls “algocratic integration”.
The State of Play : Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds
ReplyDeleteby Balkin, Jack M. (Editor); Noveck, Beth Simone (Editor)
The State of Play presents an essential first step in understanding how new digital worlds will change the future of our universe. Millions of people around the world inhabit virtual words: multiplayer online games where characters live, love, buy, trade, cheat, steal, and have every possible kind of adventure. Far more complicated and sophisticated than early video games, people now spend countless hours in virtual universes like Second Life and Star Wars Galaxies not to shoot space invaders but to create new identities, fall in love, build cities, make rules, and break them. As digital worlds become increasingly powerful and lifelike, people will employ them for countless real-world purposes, including commerce, education, medicine, law enforcement, and military training. Inevitably, real-world law will regulate them. But should virtual worlds be fully integrated into our real-world legal system or should they be treated as separate jurisdictions with their own forms of dispute resolution? What rules should govern virtual communities? Should the law step in to protect property rights when virtual items are destroyed or stolen? These questions, and many more, are considered in The State of Play, where legal experts, game designers, and policymakers explore the boundaries of free speech, intellectual property, and creativity in virtual worlds. The essays explore both the emergence of law in multiplayer online games and how we can use virtual worlds to study real-world social interactions and test real-world laws.