Sunday, November 16, 2008
16 November 2008
There’s a couple being exposed to ridicule just now who met in one of these virtual reality worlds.
In this life they look fat and unattractive; their selves in the virtual world are glamourous and rich.
They met in cyberspace, and got married there, as well as in this world.
But she found him being unfaithful to someone else in cyberspace and is now divorcing him in this life.
And they are briefly being besieged by the media.
I feel so sorry for them: it’s so easy to mock them, or condemn them for spending energy on perfecting their cyber selves when if they’d maybe spent a fraction of the same energy improving their actual lives they could well have been so much happier.
And it’s sometimes only in the imagination that we can truly and fully live.
I found myself watching an old Stanley Baxter clip on You Tube. There he was, pretending to be Liza Minelli (“Gosh, I’m gauche”) and I fell in love with him all over again.
I went straight back to the boy I was watching him on television in my parents’ house, in a state of desperate anxiety in case my father would disapprove, watching him with a kind of guilty pleasure because he was one of the desperately few representations of who I was.
The memory of that hunger – hunger for representation, even of a laughable kind – fills me with sadness.
There’s a couple being exposed to ridicule just now who met in one of these virtual reality worlds.
In this life they look fat and unattractive; their selves in the virtual world are glamourous and rich.
They met in cyberspace, and got married there, as well as in this world.
But she found him being unfaithful to someone else in cyberspace and is now divorcing him in this life.
And they are briefly being besieged by the media.
I feel so sorry for them: it’s so easy to mock them, or condemn them for spending energy on perfecting their cyber selves when if they’d maybe spent a fraction of the same energy improving their actual lives they could well have been so much happier.
And it’s sometimes only in the imagination that we can truly and fully live.
I found myself watching an old Stanley Baxter clip on You Tube. There he was, pretending to be Liza Minelli (“Gosh, I’m gauche”) and I fell in love with him all over again.
I went straight back to the boy I was watching him on television in my parents’ house, in a state of desperate anxiety in case my father would disapprove, watching him with a kind of guilty pleasure because he was one of the desperately few representations of who I was.
The memory of that hunger – hunger for representation, even of a laughable kind – fills me with sadness.
Labels: avatars, stanley baxter
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