Arredondo 1

Phillip Arredondo
Professor Fred Turner
Digital Media in Society
27 April 2010

Prompt: Do digital media free us from the cultural constraints imposed by material
places?

Virtual Detours for Material Dead Ends

Every day, we face constraints on our behavior as a result of the material world.

For instance, women can’t walk around in public wearing just lingerie, not because there

is a law against it but because it is considered socially unacceptable for a woman to be so

scantily clad. Digital media (DM) allow us to escape these constraints by offering modes

of interaction that alter aspects of the real world. These alterations include, but are not

limited to, space-time compression and total anonymity between interactors. In a virtual

environment, a woman can have her avatar, or virtual representation of herself, walk

around in lingerie without feeling stigmatized for adopting what would be considered a

taboo behavior in the real world. However, the extent to which DM may free us from

such constraints is limited since they originate in the material world which, regardless of

the affordances of technology, can never truly be escaped. In this paper, I will explore

different forms of liberation made possible by DM while explicating their limitations.

Ultimately, I will conclude that while people now have avenues by which they can

circumvent some constraints posed by real world social mores, traditional power

geometries have not yet been compromised to the degree necessary for them to no longer

influence people’s social behavior. Thus despite our digital detours, real world obstacles

have not lost their validity.

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Modes of self-expression that are barred from recognition in the real world often

find it in virtual worlds. For instance, same-sex marriages take place within Second Life

(SL) regardless of where the ceremony is performed (Boellstorff, pg. 168). While not

legally binding in real life (RL), such unions may offer a great deal of satisfaction to

those who partake in them. Yet the fact remains that once the couple logs off, depending

on where they live, there is a good possibility they won’t be able to have a marriage

officially recognized by the state, hence the monopoly on authenticity maintained by the

material world remains intact.

Another social behavior particular to SL is griefing, which has been described as

“residents act[ing] to disrupt the experience of others” (Boellstorff, pg. 187). For

instance, one resident of SL may approach another while carrying a machine gun and

demanding money implying the threat of bodily harm (Boellstorff, pg. 193). Naturally,

this type of behavior would quickly land the former in jail in RL, but due to the virtually

lawless environment provided by SL, such behavior – while not appreciated nor

encouraged – is nonetheless tolerated by residents. Hence, SL also serves as a venue for

those with malicious tendencies to express them without the social and legal

repercussions they would face in RL. However, it can also be argued that performing

virtual robberies lacks the gratification (both emotional and monetary) that performing

them in RL would provide. Thus, while virtual environments provide a platform on

which people may commit criminal acts, they are at best poor substitutes for committing

said acts in the real world.

Lastly, there is the matter of the explosive increase in mobile phone use among

Japan’s youth, which has liberated them from constraints both social and spatial. For a
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long time, household landline phones served as a means by which parents could monitor

and regulate their children’s interactions with their friends (Ito, pg. 8). However, the

recent upsurge in mobile phone use by young adults has enabled them to circumvent the

spatial boundary of the home, effectively rerouting their interactions around their parents’

surveillance via mobile technology. For instance, youths rely on mobile phones to avoid

their parents’ potentially embarrassing discovery of a romantic relationship, which brings

to mind small, early twentieth century towns and how a couple’s walk in the park would

be construed to portend marriage on the horizon (Turner, lecture). However, the

affordances of mobile technology are still restricted by the power geometry of youths’

surroundings; students may text or email each other in class, but actually talking on one’s

cell phone is considered “going too far” (Ito, pg. 10). Thus, while mobile technology

undoubtedly offers privacy, personal mobility and freedom, the material world still places

limitations on the interactions taking place, regardless of their medium.

While these examples illustrate the degree to which DM liberate us from the

bonds of reality, they nonetheless demonstrate how strong those bonds are. In the future,

the increasing extent to which DM pervade our lives may allow them to usurp the

authority of the material world; (what if people begin spending the majority of their time

in virtual communities as technologies like Seriosity’s work-games further blur the lines

between reality and non-reality?) However, as things stand, when you log off you’re still

just a person in a chair, sitting in a room, wishing you weren’t.

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