I have a strange habit. When things get really stressful, I start fantasying that I am somewhere else. This is nothing unique, but in my case, studying technologies that actually allow people to be somewhere else, it expresses itself in slightly strange ways.

When writing the literature review for my thesis, for example, and having spent so much time researching virtual communities, I decided that I should do more than read about them — I should live in one too! And so off I went to LambdaMOO, one of the most famous text-based virtual communities.

Sitting in my DC condo, I would slide my LambdaMOO existence off to one of my screens, while continuing to typing away in Word. A quick glance to the terminal with its black screen and white text was enough to remind me that somewhere else, some portion of me wasn’t enduring the pain of writing a thesis. This worked, kind of, but not for very long.

Eventually the blinking cursor became a burden; it would taunt me with accusations of abandoning the portion of my soul I had imprisoned into cyberspace. In moments of weakness, I would succumb to the cursor’s call. Yet interacting with LambdaMOO revealed how facile text-based interfaces can be, and it was clear that to participate in this “somewhere” would take a great deal of effort on my part. Unwilling to type long text descriptions of my “room” or “house” or whatever, LambdaMOO’s somewhere became a virtual “nowhere.”

Later that year, without quite realizing it, I did it again. This time I found myself wandering through Second Life. I had returned after discussing it in class, hoping that Second Life had grown up a bit and might have something more compelling to offer me this time around. In many ways it had, but I still was walking down empty virtual halls that uncomfortably reinforced the very thesis-isolation I was trying to avoid.

At some point I learned how to read the community announcements, several of which included ads for virtual raves featuring what apparently were some of Second Life’s hottest DJs. Perhaps only for the virtual company, for the next couple weeks I turned off iTunes, and sent my avatar off to different discos to listen to music (sometime broadcasting from actual club performances) and “dance” a harsh set of movements I had programmed into a macro set to endlessly loop. I would minimize my window and type away to the music, knowing that somewhere some generic representation of “me” was dancing the night away.

Fast forward to this last week. I have, with some surprise, returned to blogging with a vengeance. I think the stress and the need to “escape” has something to do with it. However, I find it curious that this time I escaped, well, into my own life. Blogging in the past has been one of the best ways for me to think through things, but sometimes the obligation of virtual (non)readership make it stifling. That said, a lot has happened since I moved to California, and I haven’t had much time to reflect on it all. Between Thanksgiving creeping up and CCT friends talking to me about their current PhD application process, I have been thinking about the things that are important to me and how grateful I am to be at UCI.

Blogging also serves another function: I find that I write so that I don’t forget. For those who are familiar with some of my current work, you know that I have been researching online death. This work has had me thinking about a quote from Foucault:

“Writing so as not to die… or perhaps even speaking so as not to die is a task undoubtedly as old as the word.”

Foucault was certainly referring to the potential for immortality through writing, but I am wondering if my scratching away at this blog attempts the almost opposite effect: Writing so as to live. Sappy endings aside, I am amused at the demise of my LambdaMOO and Second Life accounts, as well as their associated neuroses. I’d have to admit, even in the midst of all of this stress, there is no where else I’d rather be.