From: tmaddox@milton.u.washington.edu (Tom Maddox)
Subject: Lack of communication between VR commentators and everyone else.
Date: Fri, 31 May 1991 08:02:22 GMT
Organization: The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington



[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  Tom Maddox replies to some strong feelings expressed on
alt.cyberpunk regarding discussion of virtual reality.  Please excuse the
base language employed here.  It is necessary to understand the virulence
of the emotions felt by some.  I hope that the discussion on sci.virtual-
worlds can be conducted on the plane suggested by Tom. -- Bob Jacobson]


In article <10232@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU 
(Eliot Handelman) writes:

>[Referring to Cybercon2]  ... given that we can't seem to get
>any information about these talks, in part because these f***ers
>refuse to disseminate their ideas in a form congenial to the topic at
>hand, ie, on the f***ing net, in part because those who report on
>these conferences can't understand what the f*** these people are talking 
>about -- given this, all we can conclude is: very poor information 
>transfer. 

	Granted--a series of mystified references to literary types does
not constitute a summary of a conference, and it is absolutely necessary to
hear what (whoever it was) had to say.

	Did the proceedings volume that was supposed to come out of last
year's conference ever surface?  I haven't seen it.  And of course not a 
single one of that crowd ever replied to your asking why they couldn't 
post it all on the net.

>Hmmm? Original definition of "cyberschmuck": "a pontiff of information
>who hasn't heard of USENET." New definition of cyberschmuck: "a pontiff
>of information who wants to curtail possible venues of information, or
>who hasn't heard of USENET."

	Wait, are you saying that anyone posting on Usenet *can't be a 
cyberschmuck*?  That notion had never occurred to me; in fact, I thought of
Usenet as "Home of Cyberschmucks"--not that it's the only home of same, or
that everyone here (easy, folks) is a cyberschmuck, but . . .

>The world, though boring, is a big place, and information encompasses
>its bigness. If the techs and crits can't "exchange" information,
>can't, at the very fucking least, get a buzz out of each other, and
>even seem to be bored by each other -- if the information is too
>big, or too abstruse, or too unrelated, then the need to narrow
>this bigness, the need to bring this narrowing under the technological
>wing, OUGHT to be at least as expressive as the technology they hope
>for.

	Granted, again.  I was just responding through my fear & loathing
regarding many of my brethren in Christ the academic f***ing literary 
theorists, many of whom have had their thought and speech centers entirely
taken over by one virus or another--language is a virus from outer space,
indeed, but it's found a home on Earth.

>Of course, it's inevitable that the crits will go their way and the
>techs theirs. They won't be able to resolve their differences, and
>VR will ultimately be about perspectives of virtual cubes. But
>it's nice to think, all the same, that the subject of "reality"
>tried, for a while at least, to accomodate perspectives for which
>a descriptive or encapsulating language lacked.

	Well, you're making me feel as if this in the words of Strother
Martin "failure to communicate" has downright tragic implications, because
you're right--this is a brief window of *possible* information transfer,
and even it is clouded badly by mutual incomprehension, insularity, self-
regard, and two cultures xenophobia.

	I just realized that my experience of all this is badly skewed by
a one-day experience:  a tour of MCC,Inc. (American's cockamamie answer to
Japan's even more cockamamie Fifth Generation project) a year and a half 
ago.  Gibson, Sterling, Shiner, Cadigan, W. J. Williams, Ellen Datlow, and 
I got a series of demos, a tour of the joint, a lunch, some free drinks; and
in return we did a panel of sorts (at which, for some reason, John McCarthy
was in the audience).  The whole experience was vaguely depressing,
not least because try as we all might on both sides, there was very little
real information exchanged.  And regarding the panel, they seemed to expect
a bit of trad sf cheerleading for High! Technology! but got instead several
kinds of cautions about it all ranging from glum to antagonistic.  Some
folks went back last year, but I haven't really talked to anyone about it;
maybe things went a bit better, especially as there were some folks who
might have the proper tecno-politics, such as Vernor Vinge (no knock on him;
he seems a genuinely smart and nice guy).

	Anyway . . . so there was all this mutual lack of real connection,
and I got the sense that most people there would liked to have been of help
to one another, but no one could really find a way.  And the reports I've had
from this front (the various vr dog and pony shows, for instance) also 
indicate little success here.

	I feel that trying harder isn't the answer.  We, that is, the non-
technoids who have some sort of compelling interest in this stuff, and they,
the folks who build the hardware and write the software, have got to find
some semantic space in which to talk to one another.  Otherwise, as you say,
it's back to cyberspace as purely technical enterprise, which will be to
all our detriment.



-- 
				Tom Maddox
			tmaddox@milton.u.washington.edu
	"It is imperative to write invulnerable sentences."  --  Hugo Ball