When we enter Second Life (SL) we must always wait for our avatars to load. On a deserted island, at the centre of the city, or on the outskirts of the cemetery, our avatars begin to appear. They load in pieces: sometimes as heads without bodies, sometimes as a series of limbs set at improbable angles. Each time, there is a moment of disconnection: a sense that our avatars, our virtual bodies, may never quite come together. This feeling of fracture, of lag, is part of what it means to be part of SL as an embodied actor through the avatar. At the same time, the vastness of this virtual world can create an orientation of exploration, a sense of being a kind of wanderer. When our avatar bodies come together, as they always do, we can explore spaces which are quite disjunctive, culturally and socially, in terms of their architectures, purpose, and the forms of sociality they offer or expect. We entered into SL through avatar representations with a particular purpose: to try to understand the nature of death, loss, and grief in virtual worlds. In many ways, we started our journey as digital flaneurs, moving through a range of different spaces and cultures within SL to try and glean what they are and might be for their inhabitants. As explorers, wanderers, and flaneurs, however, we found that SL offered a new and disruptive type of experience. It was possible to move from one culture to another with the click of a button. Our exploration required us to be prepared and to have at our disposal many avatar forms, allowing us to follow the rules of engagement wherever we travelled. There is always, in SL as elsewhere, a sense of comparative embodiment. It is possible to tell simply by looking at an avatar how invested they are in their identity and in the space they are inhabiting. In order to engage wholeheartedly in SL we had to change our embodiment through shifting avatar forms, enduring the moment of loading, disrupture, and fracture many times in each fieldwork session. These experiences of fracture—fractured bodies and fractured spaces—are strange and confronting to the newcomer. They are, at first, a constant reminder that SL is different to the “real”, embodied world one knows and understands. But with time fracture becomes normal, expected. SL itself gains the easy predictability of the “real” world.
Computers and death are uneasy companions. Primed by generations of science fiction novels, movies, and television shows, it is becoming easier to believe that at some point, somehow, the advancement of technology will allow us to shake off that most human of burdens: our mortality. Computers seem to have the most potential to deliver. Companies like Eternime1 promise to mine our data and create a “digital avatar” through which we can “live forever.”2 Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, has popularised the idea that a more complete form of uploading—a true transition of the brain to digital form—may be possible within the next few decades. Two episodes of the Netflix programme Black Mirror help to illustrate the different forms this digital immortality is purported to take. In Be Right Back (2013), a young woman grieving the loss of her partner turns to a digital replica for comfort. Her partner is irrevocably lost, but a computer programme, drawing on data from his emails and social media posts, is able to speak in his voice and express what at first pass for his thoughts. The replica falls far short of the original. San Junipero (2016) provides a more optimistic perspective. Here the transfer of the self to the computer is complete—a person can live as a young, embodied self for eternity.
The computer, then, has an important place in popular culture as a technology through which we may one day be able to live forever. This idea speaks to an ideal of the “true self ” wherein the self is somehow extricable from the body. The self is in the mind—it is a collection of data which can be uploaded and processed. If the self as mind can be dissociated from the vulnerability of the flesh, then the threat of physical mortality is lessened or removed. In a sense our digital lifestyles lend credence to this notion. We are able to form connections and attachments which appear to exist outside of our physical embodiment. We can present ourselves as we wish—as “true selves,” selves of the mind. However, we can never extricate ourselves from the reality of our vulnerable bodies. We remain mortal, and at the moment of death our digital remainders become simply remainders of a life which is no longer.
In this book we use the term “digital flesh” to describe a type of disembodied or differently embodied—but inescapably mortal—form of life. The word “flesh” is rich with associations evoking softness and vulnerability but also ideas of meat—note the similarity to the German fleisch—or, in a more abject sense, decomposition. We have chosen the metaphor of flesh over that of the body in order to capture a less discrete figuration of the networked sociality and the co-creative reality of our embodied and storied lives with others. In describing “digital flesh” we recognise the apparent contradiction between mortal, embodied, destructible flesh and clean, data-driven progress as represented by computers. It is in this very contradiction and tension that the term derives its descriptive potency. Members of computer-mediated communities can develop “digital flesh” through ongoing processes of engagement which render them necessarily vulnerable to moral harm. Digital flesh, like embodied flesh, is mortal. However, while every person who enters and engages with a computer-mediated community is mortal, it is not the case that every person will develop digital flesh in this sense. The term implies the development over time of connections, of memories, and of temporal and emotional investments.
In digital modernity human lives are profoundly shaped and intertwined with smart and intelligent machines. This has led to an existential shift in the way relationships are forged, sustained, mobilised, and maintained. Computers, smart phones, Wi-Fi, broadband, fibre optics, apps, and social media, alongside game and virtual worlds, are part of a vast connective tissue of communication and commerce that is central to human life and sociality. Donna Haraway has been a key theorist in understanding the ways in which the human body has merged with machines in a manner that addresses an overlapping between soft flesh and digital flesh. Her concept of the cyborg that involves the interfacing of humans and machines captures the way in which human bodies, psyches, and relationships interact in the virtual spheres of digital life. Human beings have not only “always interacted with technologies,”3 they are a species characterised by imagination, fantasy, techne, and prostheses. At the same time, we are biological beings, and the sensory and sensuous world of touch and smell grounds our most basic existence and earliest affective bonds. This is transferred and translated, not without difference and loss, into digital lifeworlds. Some digital products and technologies seek more explicitly than others to replicate the intercorporeality of human relationships in circumstances where actual bodily contact is impossible. Apple Watches, a wearable technology which may be connected to the near-ubiquitous iPhone, boast a feature whereby a “digital touch” can be sent from one wearer to another. Using this feature, it is possible to send one’s heartbeat to a loved one in another part of the world, who will feel it, through the medium of the watch, on their own wrist.4
In the virtual world SL, this type of explicit and physical experiential intercorporeality is impossible. However, the biological anchor of living, breathing, vulnerable bodies serves to connect the digital avatar to the reality of human existence. Without this anchor affective online connections and relationships would be impossible and the grievability of avatar lives unimaginable. In this book we see the relationship between avatar embodiment and the embodied person behind the screen as one of intercorporeality. There is an affective, two-way relationship between these bodies—a critical insight and perspective Tom Boellstorff has brought to ethnography in virtual world environments.5 As humans we still need to be in touch with the bodies of those we love outside and beyond the digital sphere. But we are also moved and touched by virtual and representational bodies expressed through and embodied in digital code. Unlike Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013) where a fantasy of intimacy and the development of a relationship take place between a man and his own female-gendered personal operating system, SL is still a world grounded within the human-to-human encounter of the digital screen although the human factor can be morally forgotten because of the avatar and also through the privacy and anonymity that the virtual world SL affords. Her is mediated by images of a real-life relationship that failed. As symbolic and psychical wound, the real is displaced by the fantasy of a less complicated relationship and intimacy in the form of a sophisticated technology which is able to replicate, through voice, the presence of a human woman. While the absent body is triumphantly discarded, it becomes as the film unfolds a persistent source of loss and longing in memories of the former partner. In our research the avatar is sometimes a tool for maintaining a separation and boundary between real and second life. It is for some a way of conducting relationships, sexual gratification, and experimentation with clear limits and boundaries around real information sharing and emotional investment beyond or through the screen. Residents usually make their boundaries clear in their profile story. However, in the avatar persona in SL, like that of other digital personas in online environments, where identity can be disguised or hidden, hurtful and questionable behaviour is a common problem. A lack of conscience or moral forgetfulness is often called out by residents who will often use the phrase “there are real people behind the avatars.” The real is often then a touchstone of morality—a place in which people can be brought back to their moral senses.
In this book we focus on lives constructed and represented through avatars—a means through which the digital flesh becomes embodied as a type of perfected facsimile of living, soft, flesh. Avatar lives and lifeworlds are inevitably inte...