RSS 2.0Location: The weather.com Web Page
As a weather-obsessed person (odd, given that it’s “drought and more drought” here), I often check this site. For some time I’ve been meaning to write about the little women doing happy dances along the sides of this and other commercial sites. They often advertise mortgage specials, I suppose to those 10 Americans still solvent enough to consider buying a house.
They also tell us quite a bit about the intrusion of the virtual into our workaday lives.
Yes, she’s an avatar.
At first, these little dancing women (never men) were from video clips. Then I began to notice that slowly, avatars made with the Poser software were doing the boogie-woogie in the boxes on my screen.
It’s inevitable that such applications of avatars would appear. I first encountered this notion of the avatar while in grad school about 20 years ago, not as a 3D being but as a bunch of code resembling a rudimentary AI to do things for you when you slept or were busy in real life. Avatars might search for news headlines of interest, chart the weather or stocks or sports scores. These faithful servants would put information at your virtual doorstep when you asked.
You do not, of course, need 3D dollies to gather and sort information: RSS feeds do some of this. In those Cyberpunk-infused years of the late 80s, however, we all imagined our avatars—both small applications and 3D figures out of Gibson’s fiction—taking some drudgery from daily tasks and streamlining a too-busy world.
Instead, for now they hawk iffy mortgage offers and car loans, or they sit on camping chairs for absent creators. Oh, tepid new world that has such people in it!
Yet in virtual worlds, the people behind the avatars are usually present. In game worlds as opposed to social worlds like Second Life (thanks go to Mark Meadows’ I, Avatar for giving me those terms) one cannot easily leave an avatar idle. In some games, unless guild-members were standing guard, leaving the keyboard might result in an avatar being impaled by an Orc’s sword.
In Second Life, a virtual business—the extension of the avatar’s inventory—qualifies as what we imagined in the 80s. It earns money while the owner and avatar are absent. It’s sad to see how some wannabe Donald Trumps set up “businesses in a box” and then check out of SL, expecting money to flow in that never arrives. I’m told that to run a SL business well, the owner must invest time and talent to keep clients happy.
Thus it’s both amusing and sad to show the next image. It comes from a once-thriving Japanese shopping mall that used to offer generous camping of the sit-on-a-bench or swab-that-floor variety. Last week I went there to poke around for a cool (and cheap) male Kimono I’d seen. Iggy might need it explore Hosoi Chiba after I investigate Ida Keen’s vanishing. In any case, the mall was clearly failing, with most of the stalls empty and lots just torn down.
The owner, possessing a morbid sense of humor while his business goes under, parked dozens of fire-engines that sprayed water on virtual fires throughout the empty place. I suspected a griefer attack until I checked one of the vehicles. Its owner also run the mall.
And in their midst, this:
The fellow blithely mopped the floor while the place burned down. He didn’t even bother to pick up a free mop! Another afk avatar strummed a guitar nearby for 1 Linden Dollar every 10 minutes. Perhaps their owners would do better to get Poser to design dancing mortgage-women for a debt-ridden, economically foundering nation. Or maybe these camping avatars are just the metaphor we need as America’s economic house burns down?
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