What Happens On The Internet, Stays On The Internet: Vegas, the Internet, and our artifical perceptions of artifice

Elizabeth — Wed, 13 May 2009 02:59:27 +0000

Vegas is a magical place of lions, tigers, and barely legal coeds. While Vegas may have had its flirtation with a G rating in the 90s with its attempt at being family friendly, today it has given up any pretense of civility in favor of being a sexy, surreal, synthetic, and yet, secretly substantive. Funnily enough, that strikes me as being quite similar to the internet.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have finally come to that all-time low of writing my definitive work on the internet and the metaphor I choose is Vegas. Why you ask? Is it the floozies that haunt the casino tables and above-the-head-cleavage shots that are so popular on MySpace? Is it the the funny money promised at the slot machines and that disappeared with the dot-com bust? Is it that you can get anything from Vegas or eBay? (I bought a bull whip last time I was in Vegas). Or could it be the all-you-can-eat gorge-fest, be it filling your stomachs or your hard drives. It could be. But lets talk about what really matters in this world: porn, personas, pseudo realities, and the repercussions of our actions.

Hookers and Pornography

We know the obvious comparison. Don’t pretend to be “holier than thou” with me

While prostitution is illegal in Las Vegas, that doesn’t keep “call girls,” “bachelor’s guides,” “escorts,” and “models” from being readily available through small, easily accessible local publishings. Of course, one only needs to sit in a bar for a while to have the service come to you. Even better, when something is illegal, that always increases the likelihood of getting scammed, as would be the case in this fine environment. Where else have we been finding a rich crops of scams popping up?

According to the experts and top Google search result for “statistic porn on internet,” 28,258 internet users are viewing pornography every second. And there is a lot of pornography to be had. In 2006, there were 75,608,612 search requests for “sex” made, with 414 million web pages containing that key word. Granted, I suppose my site now hosts such an unsightly term. Regardless, if you want it, the internet has it.

And, no, you pervs, I’m not including a picture to illustrate my point.

Simulacra and Virtual Environments

Vegas’s one and only New York New York. 2x better than the original, right?The oh so mundane original

Because we know that the “real” is never good enough, we have lego reproductions of national monuments, recreations of small towns as found in Disneyland, and camping in your back yard. It’s fun to pretend you are on safari, but who really wants to sweat out the sun or bat off the flies? But none of these locations can out do Vegas for sheer garishness. Be it The Venetian’s watery corridors, the Luxor’s looming sphinx, or the Mirage’s hourly exploding volcano, all these displays are flashy recreations of some original location or event. Living in New York as I am, what could be better than my window view of the Chrysler Building? The answer would obviously be a window view of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Soho, and a roller coaster! And you can see it all through New York New York’s hotel and casino.

The scary thing is, it works. People come to these places to get a dose of the unusual. Want to pretend you an ancient Roman emperor? Well, at the very least you can spend with the same frightening extravagance. Bread and circuses don’t even compare to the free drinks and shows to be collected at a casino near you.

I can almost, almost understand the appeal of these locations. But what about when they aren’t even physical. Do people still come? Hell yes. We know of the dual environment of second life, the fantasized and romanticized (franticized?) Dark Age lands of World of Warcraft. I had hoped to show you my own little environment in Second Life, but I couldn’t create an account. According to the site:

Registration Unavailable
Linden Lab limits the number of accounts any household or individual may create.
You appear to have exceeded this limit.

Yes my fine readers, I couldn’t make an account because, so many people before me already had. My building has exceeded the limit. Granted, I’m in university housing. I suppose that would make a difference. But think how many students made their Second Life accounts here in order to avoid the all too real pain of actually studying for the final. I’m an abnormality: I wanted to create an account for a final.

But why would these slackers be making such accounts? Might I direct your gaze a little lower on the page?

Identity

Be Anyone

My life rocks. So, while I wouldn’t want to be someone else, I can understand why someone would want to pretend to be me. So what of identities? Usually we are rather tied to ours. We have the joys of paper work that require, not only a name but a social security number and further id. So, how does someone get to be someone else? When can we stop being the tired student and be the sexy double agent? Well, if you want to drink martinis and not ask names, Vegas is waiting. In fact, they are ready to generate your whole identity for you with Be Anyone In Vegas.

Be Anyone character generation control panel. In a city where you can be anyone, who will you be?

Be Anyone control panel gives the low down on your character and your identity packet to back it up

Pick your name, where you’re from, and other attributes of your new persona. You have 100 points to share between five characteristics – distributing them any way you want. Based on your choices, Be Anyone will give you a profession and everything you need to back up your story, including: a brief history, printable business card, prerecorded 1-800 number, and web site.

With the site, users can build a character: manipulating smoothness, style, bravery, attitude, and creativity, selecting a name and place of origin.

Hello, I’m Lolita. My Card.

I, for one, am Lolita. My life is a double-edged sword. My closest friends and colleagues believe I would never betray them. That’s what makes me the perfect double agent. I work for the greater good, but no one can ever know. I command a dozen different languages, am a master of disguise, and can survive for a week in the desert with just a spoon. Ladies envy my style and charm. Men want me. Neither know that I risk my cover with each new person I meet.

I’m in town just to unwind after some really nasty business across the equator. *Pause and look over shoulder quickly* So I’d really rather not talk about work.

website: www.TheSeaIsGreen.com

Phone number: 1-866-382-9702

And I didn’t even have to come up with any of that on my own. Thank you Vegas, you’ve been a great host!

Funnily, this system is a clear rip-off of gaming mechanics for role playing games found both on paper and the internet. Let’s look at a rather popular example: World of Warcraft.

Thought Be Anybody was a little much? What about be anything? For those so inclined, players don’t even have to stick to their own species with such fantasy games as World of Warcraft where players can choose from a variety of species including dwarves, orcs, trolls, gnomes, night elves, blood elves, undead, tauren, draeni, or stick with boring humanity, if you really must. Some of these things I’ve never even heard of. And, yet, the time and money that players devote to their characters rivals the time I spend staring blankly at my computer screen.

Meet Anyone

So, we’ve covered the happy, fuzzy side of identity. We can be who we want. What about when other people are being someone else? The confidence men are rife on both the Strip and the Web. Be it the man who spent all his money at the slots and needs some money so his family can sleep in a hotel (dude, don’t try to hit up students, we don’t even have enough money for ourselves) or the Nigerian security guard ready to cut you in on a juicy, multimillion dollar consignment box if you’ll only forward a relatively small bit of money. While most of us know that Thordar of Heafclave and Lolita aren’t real, there are the few that fund the “family men” and “security guards” of this world by buying their schpeal…literally.

Handling the Truth

Forget America, Vegas is the land of opportunities, you can go anywhere, be anyone, do anything, or do anyone. It is the city where the roads are made of poker chips and you earn money for playing games. As the Visit Vegas site attests:

Magnificent hotels glow green and gold. Pink, red, yellow, blue and white neon pulsates all around. Electric lights flash. Music plays. Volcanoes erupt. Fountains soar. Cars create two moving streams of light, red and white. People in the thousands walk up, down and over the Strip. Roller coasters corkscrew high above the ground. A laser beam, visible from space, penetrates the night sky, inviting the whole universe to come and play.

And that’s only outside – step into any of the iconic casino resorts along the Strip, and you’ll enter a world of pure imagination.

And best of all, we are all constantly reassured that what “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” But does it really?

I hear a lot about how “fake” a place is, Los Angeles, Disneyland, Los Vegas. The funny thing is, this sense of falseness conceals the all to true substantive nature of the place. The money that is spent in Vegas, stays in Vegas. The pictures that are taken in Vegas show up in the office. And the STIs contracted in Vegas, have a nasty habbit of sticking around.

In the case of the internet, there is a perception of it being “the wild west.” In a conversation I had with a total stranger on Omegle, I was struck by the following exchange:

Stranger: I like the internet as the wild west.

Stranger: Deregulated

Stranger: messy

Stranger: often borderline illegal.

You: ah, there’s an interesting law article describing that as a particular misconseption

You: but yes,

You: there is an appeal to that

Stranger: It’s as close to a sort of pure intellectual freedom or genuinely communal cultural space that we have.

Stranger: It really is this cultural commons where ALL this information hangs out and can swiped and remixed and fucked around with and reintroduced and rediscovered.

As I mentioned in this conversation, Eugene Volokh has a lot to say about the perceptions of the internet being “a wild west” free of law, in his exploration of the law and the internet:

This shows the fallacy of the Wild West theory of the Internet—the notion that the Internet is currently lawless, or that it should be lawless. In fact, lots of laws apply to the Internet: Threat law, false advertising law, extortion law, contract law, libel law, copyright law, and the like. Try sending someone an e-mail saying Pay me $10,000 or I’ll burn down your house, and you’ll see that there’s law on the Internet.

But how can law be maintained in a land where everyone has an alias and a backstory to go with it? We aren’t talking about Thordar of Heafclave any more. We are talking about geekman182@hotmail.com. She didn’t use her real name when she signed up for her hotmail account. In fact, she didn’t even use her actual gender. But that doesn’t mean that she can’t be tracked down like an elephant on a mudflat by those in the know.

Like Vegas, we think that, because we use fake names and give fake numbers, we are immune from the repercussions of our actions. Yet, never was that farther from the case. In fact, the internet, if anything, made this more the case as our every action is not only remembered but recorded. Volokh describes this as “the end of the ephemeral.” Our emails, instant messages, video chats, forum postings, blogs, social networks, and business databases of credit card numbers and SSNs all record our words and actions so that they may crop up at any old time. Black hats don’t have to hack your bank account, they only have to hack the database of a particularly unscrupulous store owner who has maintained records of a purchase you made five years ago.

It is ironic, that at the point that we think we are being the most insightful, the most realistic, the most grounded, recognizing the “shallowness,” the “superficiality,” the “irrelevance” of both Vegas and the Internet, we are actual exposing our greatest vulnerability. Vegas may have a glittering facade, the internet may only offer pseudo relationships, but what lies underneath is very, very real. There is no more Wild West. Instead, there are cameras, malware, cellphones, Facebook, people search engines, and the plain fact of it all is, even without all this technology, people remember. I don’t believe in cautionary tales and listing “what not to do.” But when you do it, never expect it to be forgotten.

Bibliography

Be Anyone In Las Vegas. 2009. Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. 30 April 2009.

Internet Pornography Statistics. 2009. TopTenREVIEWS. 11 May 2009.

New York New York. 2009. MGM Mirage. 11 May 2009.

Online posting. 30 March 2009. Omegle.

Races. 2009. Blizzard Entertainment. 12 May 2009.

Second Life. 2009. Linden Lab. 3 May 2009.

Tony. “Classic Nigerian 401 Scam“. Online Posting. 29 September 2008. What Consumer. 11 May 2009.

Volokh, Eugene. U.S. Law and Cyberspace: Five Basic Principles.

Spring Classes

Elizabeth — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:27:53 +0000

2009 means new year, a new semester, and lots of new classes. And here we are, the last day of break, just at the jumping off point. Over the break I have updated my website, made progress on my life dress, and dream site, though none of them are finished. Also, there is this odd little thing that i had been neglecting, called a social life, which I tried to resurrect.

But no more! Because January 21st isn’t just the first day of the Obama administration, it’s also the first day of classes. Actually, it’s a lot of firsts. And with this transition comes some new foci. Shall we review the pertinent ones?

I actually do not have any Monday classes (can anyone say three day weekend?), so my week starts early Tuesday morning. At 9:30, I have the pleasure of pretending to be awake for Living Art. It’s a pity since I really think this class will be awesome but it is so early I don’t know how competent I will be. After a half hour break, I’m back with Little Computers, a class about writing applications for the iPhone. I don’t know about you, but this sounds just plane fun. Besides, it’s probably the easiest class to explain to any outsider who asks about what I do.

Wednesday is far more civilized,beginning at 12:30 with Nature of Code *Fingers Crossed*. You see, I’m actually not enrolled for the class. I’m waitlisted at number 7. That’s not a good place to be for on of the most desired courses in the department. Still, those ahead of me on the list should be identified in the first class, so I should be able to deal with them by the end of the week…Even if I don’t get into Nature of Code, I will still have to show up at 3:30 for Design Expo. This is probably the class that I’m the least certain about. It sounds awesome, but a lot of the enjoyment of the class will depend on the team that I wind up being on. Still, this is ITP, so I’m not terribly worried about that.

Thursday has, by far, the most enlightened schedule, beginning, as all good days do, at 3:30PM. I like how my days get later and later as I gradually wind down. This was the class that everyone assumed I was in since it’s the field that I have been the most focused on: Wearables Studio. This is a great class, since I will be able to focus on one or two major projects. I don’t know about you, but I think that is awesome.

Now, here is the quirky part of my schedule: I’m also enrolled in a two unit class that meets once every two weeks on Friday. I know, Friday. So, every other week, I have a four day weekend. For those weeks where I only have three days off, I will be attending Information Contours. Granted, I’ve heard mixed things about this class, so I might not keep it.

Regardless, that is my State of the Schedule address. It’s good to be back. I’ll be sure to be sharing some lovely projects over the course of this semester.

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