As has become habit over the past couple of years, this past week I headed over to the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program Winter Show. ITP is a graduate program started by Red Burns with a mission to “explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people’s lives.” While not as robust as last year’s Spring Show (due to the fact that the Spring show is often a display of many of the grad students’ master theses), the Winter Show definitely lived up to ITP’s vision of producing imaginative uses of tech.  I’ll share some of my favorite projects.

As would be appropriate, the first project on display when you walked into the show was ITP Guest Book, a web project meant to be accessed via an iPhone or iPod Touch that helped show goers leave comments on specific projects and navigate the space via a built in map and project categorization system.  While I loved the concept, I didn’t really find myself utilizing the app, preferring to organically navigate the space and save my commenting for the blog, where I could leverage a bit more of a hindsight view of things.

Many of the show’s projects were less utilitarian of course, with a whole slew that fell on the more artistic side of the technological spectrum.  My absolute favorite in the arts category was tek(s)nesonic, which featured a projected screen which captured those that walked in front of a camera and then mapped falling letters and numbers (which viewers could enter themselves) into the image, each of which were associated with different sound samples.  People who found themselves in the frame could then interact with the falling characters, “catching” them and activating the associated sounds.  I found myself delighted when a P would land on my shoulders and start beeping until I moved and it continued to fall.  Ingenious.

Also featured in the “delightful interactive art” category was Dynamic Ground, which featured some neato “floor tiles” which expanded and contracted when stepped on.  Could definitely see this as an incredible museum installation in which an entire room’s floor shifted and danced, so to speak, in response to people’s movement.  Check it out below. (video courtesy of the project’s creators)

On the more serious side of things, the ITP show often features projects with a political or pro-social bent, and my favorite of these was called The Bed, which was a dynamic data visualization of conflicts around the world. Faux blood would drip down onto a projected map of the world in places where conflicts are occurring, or, at least, in places where the media has decided to report on conflict.  The “drips” were based on feeds from news organizations that were pulled into and analyzed by a semantic computer program that looked for words associated with conflict.  I didn’t get to watch it develop over time, seeing it at the very beginning of the show when it started creating its visualization, but even then there were already multiple conflict zones mapped in the Middle East, with only one in all of Africa.  I think the project really portrayed well how perceptions of global conflict are shaped (and skewed) by a news media that is highly selective and not necessarily fully representative of events happening across the globe.

One project that particularly spoke to me was another data visualization (these types of projects were definitely well represented at the show) not of geopolitics but rather of energy use.  It was called Energy Informatics, and the goal of the project was to make tangible how energy usage changes over time in the places most relevant to us: our residences.  Using  NYU residence halls as an example, the visualization overlaid a translucent color map onto a real image of the building.  The color map would change over time representing how energy usage in the halls went up and down over the course of the day.  I definitely think that this type of visualization will become increasingly important over time.

The final project I’ll share which struck my fancy was called Online|Offline ChessGame.  I mainly loved it because it was a new take on an old idea: correspondence chess.  In the project, each of the players uses a physical chess pieces and board just as they would in a standard game, but one that was modified to allow for play at a distance.  The board would indicate what moves an opponent is making, allowing a person to move those pieces to maintain a physical setup of where the game is at.  As the possibility of chess play over a distance became more viable than ever with the advent of the internet, much of the physicality of the game was lost with people playing on screens.  I’m all for technology that allows us the advantages that advanced telecommunications makes possible, without the need to sit and stare at a screen for hours.

Overall, some really great projects at the show.  Congrats to all the participants.

See here, and below, for my full photoset from the show.

My fellow meditators in the windows of ABC Home

When I signed up to be part of the Interdependence Project’s meditation marathon, to sit for 24 hours in the windows of the most sheeshy home furnishing store in New York City as part of a fundraiser for the organization, I knew it would be intense.  I just didn’t know what the nature of that intensity would be.  I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about or preparing for the sit, as I didn’t have much context for this kind of experience to base any preparation on.  I mostly considered that I’d be sitting for 24 hours (with of course walking meditation mixed in), and the only context I had for such an extended period of meditation was meditation retreats, usually about a week long, that I’ve been going on for some time now.  Those retreats are, naturally, very intense from an internal standpoint.  Generally retreatants, or yogis as they’re often called, are in idyllic surroundings with delicious food and lots of silence, but are so intimately engaged in focused meditation that they tend to experience euphoric highs but also debilitating lows, with plenty of peacefulness and straightup boredom mixed in.  And so when I was thinking about what to prepare for when sitting 24 hours, I largely thought of it in these terms, as a subjective experience.

What I basically forgot about was that I’d be sitting in an *extremely* public space, a street level storefront window that’s meant to highlight things to otherwise uninterested passers by.  And wow, were the passers by  interested.  I guess it isn’t everyday that you see about a dozen people meditating in window, but wow.  The fact that our 24 hours included a Friday night in a pretty busy part of New York City probably helped in terms of the amount of attention we got.  Here are some of the general sentiments I heard, paraphrased:

“Are they for real?”

“Are they real?”

“Wow, those people are incredible. That’s discipline!”

“I wish I could do that.”

“I used to meditate, I should really start again.”

“What a waste of time.”

“Get a life!”

“How much do you cost?! I want to take you home!” (Note: not a paraphrase.)

There were obviously many more, and some pretty extreme ones as well.  Many people tapped, and sometimes even banged, on the windows, I guess to try to disturb something they thought wasn’t meant to be. Many others laughed, sometimes at us, sometimes more at how surreal the whole thing was. One person, in the more late hours of Friday night, even mooned one of the window sections. The drunk people definitely got the prize for most colorful responses.  At the same time, these highly visible responses shouldn’t overshadow the many people that quietly stopped, watched, even meditated with us, and engaged the IDP volunteers that were present to talk to people about what the event was and invite them to come for free meditation classes that were being held inside of ABC home throughout the day on Saturday.

While most of the time my eyes were closed, I did eventually start sit with my eyes open and downcast so that I could stay awake. Once I started doing that, more people would actually try to engage me, making faces, tapping, staring, and taking photos. (I actually don’t think I’ve ever been photographed more over the course of a day in my life.)  One person flipped me a bird.  Many others smiled.  Some even bowed.  Towards the end, I kept my eyes open more and more, still meditating, but often smiling back and doing lovingkindness practice, radiating well wishes for all the folks who stopped and those that didn’t.

These reactions, the inter-subjective experiences of what was essentially a group of people in dialogue over the course of 24 hours,  actually ended up being the defining aspect of my experience, as opposed to any subjective, internal mind states that might have come up (though I’ll admit that the knee pain was pretty bad). The range of those responses, how they changed over the course of the 24 hours, and my own reactions to them, ended up making my meditation experience one of relationship and dialogue about what people perceived myself and my fellow meditators to be doing.

Ultimately, what we were doing, and what I failed to reflect on in advance of the sit, was starting a conversation.  Our t-shirts said “Sit Down, Rise Up”, the Interdependence Project’s slogan. Our public sitting was an embodiment of our philosophy: if we wish to change the world, we need to change our minds, and with changed minds, we engage more effectively and compassionately with others (though the process isn’t near that linear). The people meditating started a conversation with passers by, and the many IDP volunteers that were there with flyers and talking points closed the loop and let them know what our work was all about.  And I think that people were affected, if only to see for a moment a group of people trying to better their hearts.

Many thanks to all the people that sponsored me to sit, to my fellow meditators and volunteers at the Interdependence Project, to my friends Nick, Rik and Sebené that dropped by to show support, and to all of the people that stopped for a moment to consider what we were doing.  May all beings find happiness.

And… here’s me sitting in a window. :)

More pictures from the event here and here.

And so tonight I found myself in the familiar situation of arriving at the Brooklyn Museum (best polling place ever) not really knowing much about the people on the ballot.  Last time this happened I figured that I should use the resources I had at hand to become an at least somewhat informed voter, so I sat down on the floor, took out my iPhone, and painstakingly reviewed various articles about the candidates on its small screen.

This time, I thankfully had my laptop with me, and using the museum’s free wifi, was able to do critical last minute research to inform my decisions.  I checked the sites of various local organizations that I know to see who they endorsed, as well as the local section of the Times to get their take on who would be best for various offices.  Armed with a much greater understanding of who the people on the ballot were and where they stood on various issues, I entered one of those classic New York polling booths, made my selection, and pulled the lever with a sense that I had not only done my civic duty by voting, but didn’t waste my vote as a result of being entirely uninformed.

Now, I acknowledge that I personally could have done a lot better in terms of following these elections, especially recognizing the importance of these local offices and their impact on my work, neighborhood and city.  At the same time, I don’t think that I was that unique.  People are busy, New Yorkers especially.  These candidates have far less resources than those in national Presidential or Congressional races, so we don’t see a lot of advertising from them, save on the day of (the streets were littered with postcards proclaiming various candidates’ virtues today).  The mainstream news media does cover them, but not on the front page and not nearly as thoroughly as it does for more prominent elections, as we do live in a market driven media system and the demand isn’t as great for this kind of reportage.  As a result the demand for information was left to the last minute for a person like me, and so I approached the problem in the way that seemed to make the most sense given the situation: I got the information at the point of decision.

Doing so, I engaged in what educational theorists call “just in time” learning.  This kind of learning is contrasted to “just in case” learning, where the learner learns something on the chance that they might need to know it at a later point, but the situation in which they might apply it is certainly not present, and may never be.  For a great example of just in case learning, think back to a good bit of your high school experience.  I swear I have never used trigonometry.  Anyhow, just in time learning is basically how most people in practical contexts actually manage to get things done, calling on the resources that they need to accomplish a task as they’re working on it.

For example, when I first started my job I had this idea that I should take a class on using the image editing program Photoshop.  The level of busyness at work meant that I never got around to it, but as I began to do projects that required me to use it, I would ask my colleagues for a couple of minutes of their time to show me how to get something to work.  I know know how to do the kinds of things that I need to when using the program.

So, as opposed to sitting around reading books that might be relevant at some point (though there certainly is a big place for that, and a good learner will figure out the right balance between these two approaches), someone engaged in just in time learning learns the information that is most relevant to the current moment, as opposed to some potential future moment.

My thought, after having my experience this evening, was that perhaps people don’t vote on election day not because they’re too busy, or don’t fully care, but rather that they don’t want to waste their time with something they know nothing about.  What if, though, they knew that there was a bank of laptops at the polling station, and that they could look candidates up, just as I had, when that information was most critical?  Regardless of this pie in the sky policy idea, down the line the majority of the population will be carrying some sort of device that connects them to the vast amount of information on the net in any case, and so I wonder how civic participation might change if more and more people simply decide to go into that polling station, knowing that they can take a couple of minutes to figure out how they want to vote, as opposed to just skipping the whole process entirely.

I agree that the speech was really wonderful, and important, but do have a bone to pick with Obama on this one.  Hear me out.

Throughout the entire speech the predominant theme was that youth need to take responsibility for their own education.  Don’t drop out.  Don’t disrespect your teachers.  Do the work even if it may not seem relevant.  And above all, it’s ultimately up to you whether you succeed or not.  Generally good messages, but really only good messages for students.

For society at large, we know, however, that “it takes a village”, to quote an old African proverb, and that the village that was put in charge of education has failed.  It has failed because it was designed for a different world, and has been ornery in the face of adaptation.  It has failed through cutting costs, it has failed through irrelevant content, it has failed by favoring teaching methods that are at best boring and at worst antagonize young people to the idea of learning.  It has failed to realize that it needs to teach attitudes and orientations as opposed to facts and figures.  And it’s a failure that Obama didn’t mention a word about, glossing over this ossified aspect of American society using a fail safe mantra of rugged American individualism when what the education system really needed was a serious jolt about how this is a problem of communities and systems, of parent involvement and teacher training and of fear in the face of special interests that control testing and textbooks, as opposed to just giving a pep talk to kids saying that they should take their studies more seriously.  After all, if you were given the system that they were, would you?

When taken in the larger context, Obama certainly said some nice things, but no where near enough.  This was a fine thing for the president to say to young people on their first day back to school, but if this President wants to make any impression on me when it comes to education, he’ll have to say, and do, much much more.  This was his first day of school to me, and he did alright.  An A for effort and showing up.  We’ll see what his grades are like, though, at the end of the year.

I’m aiming to raise $1,000 to support this budding community, whose members are dedicated to examining their own lives and their engagement with the world through the lens of interdependence, one that implicitly acknowledges the connection that we all have to one another.  It’s in this spirit that I ask you to support me.  Conscious and active grassroots communities are able to thrive with the help of people that believe in their value, and if you do, please support me as much as you’re able.

If you’d like to sponsor me for one of my 24 hours of sitting, you can give $42, which would be awesome, as then I’d need only 23 more people to do the same!  Alternatively, I invite you to give what you want and how you want.  More is great.  Less is great.  All is appreciated.  I thank you all in advance for your support.  If you have any questions about the organization, the work that I’m involved in, and how we’ll be aiming to utilize the funds raised, don’t hesitate to be in touch (Rafi at empathetics dot org), or check out the event details over at the ID Project’s web site.

In short, my grandfather was an Hungarian American Communist who was one of the founders of the Transport Workers Union, became a high level official in the Hungarian Communist Government, and eventually defected from said government for a host of reasons not least of which was total disillusionment with Communism as it manifested in its brutal and paranoid form in cold war Hungary.

As I conducted initial research about his life, one of the key books that I found was called In Transit, a great read that documents the history of the TWU.  It’s by a labor historian, Josh Freeman, who teaches here in New York at the City University of New York Graduate Center.  I figured that since he was so close, literally blocks from my office, I’d try to contact him and see if we could meet to chat and possibly fill in some blanks I had in the story of my grandfather’s life.  Luckily, Josh is a really wonderful man and sat down with me for a long conversation where he was able to give me some historical context within which I could better understand what I’m coming to realize is an even more fascinating and complex political and personal history than I imagined.

While I won’t go over everything that I discovered in that meeting, one of the most interesting points, regarding my grandfather’s move to Hungary and joining the government there, does merit mention.  My understanding of his move from my research up to that point was that he found himself on trial and about to be deported from the States in 1947 (apparently along with many other major labor leaders) and that the International Communist Party reached out and offered him a position in the Hungarian government, which he took for obvious reasons of both avoiding deportation and joining what was possibly one of the top 500 or 1,000 highest posts in the entire country of Hungary .  While this view of events was not quite inaccurate, Josh was able to offer some context around what was going on at the time in Eastern Europe that led him to believe that the Hungarian government wasn’t being entirely generous in the case of my grandfather.

He shared that at the same time that McCarthyism and the Red Scare was burgeoning in the United States, there was a parallel xenophobic climate coming to a head in Eastern Europe.  In the US, the government persecuted suspected Communists. In Eastern Europe, many governments, including the Hungarian Government, persecuted suspected Western spies, or anyone inconvenient that could be portrayed as such. This was a period during which homegrown Communists in Eastern European satellite countries were being ousted by the USSR in favor of politicians whose loyalties lied more deeply with the central authorities in the East.  The use of Show Trials, elaborate constructed and highly public hoaxes, was quite a popular method of doing so.

This persecution in Eastern Europe, as compared to the States, was far more sinister. People targeted at best disappeared to concentration camps, and at worst, just disappeared, likely hung or otherwise killed by secret police forces.  These show trials often targeted people that could easily be suspected of having ties to Western governments and those that had cosmopolitan backgrounds for the purposes of showing the general population the need to be ever vigilant against insidious Western spies.  In addition, there was a strong antisemitic bent to the persecution.  My grandfather fit all of the characteristics of someone that would be a target of these show trials.  He had spent most of his adult life in the United States, and spent most of that time in New York City, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world.  He was, of course, also Jewish.  Nevermind, of course, that he was a card carrying Communist and successfully organized not an insignificant portion of “the proletariat” in New York City, this could easily be written off as a front.  Joshua believed that rather than being brought to Hungary due to a need on the part of the government for effective institutional leaders, though this may have been a pretense, the real reason for his journey there, from the perspective of the government, was to be the subject of or play a role in one of these show trials.

In the end my grandfather was not part of these trials in any way, though when their invalidity was made public in the mid 1950’s, it had a significant impact on my grandfather and greatly increased his disillusionment with the Communist regime.  Why he wasn’t involved though is a bit of a mystery if we take this premise to be accurate.  Josh believed that it might have been some sort of bureaucratic snafu, though this wasn’t totally working for me as an explanation.

Reflecting on my grandfather’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Affairs, though, I remembered a meeting that he had shortly after his arrival there with a very high level government official.  In the meeting, he was questioned heavily about the loyalties of various prominent American Communists, which he strongly vouched for in the face of accusations against them.  (see pages 18-20 of the testimony if you’re interested in reading about this meeting).  My thought was that there was a possibility that this meeting had some sort of effect on the official that caused him to decide not to involve my grandfather in the trials.

This further context put an entirely new spin on the story I’d constructed about my grandfather, and when I was in the meeting with Josh reflecting on what the implications of this would have been for my life had things turned out differently, I voiced that it was a bit surreal that but for a bureaucratic snafu or a chance meeting my grandfather avoided untimely death and I was able to sit there in an office on 35th street.  Sometimes, life just does that I guess.

Curious about this point of the trials, I went home after the meeting and decided to see if I could find anything in my grandfather’s testimony that might have pointed to this morbid premise.  Upon a closer examination of it, I found one reference that I had glossed over when I first read the document.  In one series of questions, my grandfather stated that in his later years in Hungary he believed that he might have been brought to Hungary to be a confessor in the show trial of László Rajk, perhaps the best known of the Hungarian show trials.  He mentions it just in passing in the testimony, but nothing more is said about why he believed this, so for the most part this aspect of the story remains a mystery.  I did find it significant though that there was some evidence other than Josh’s intuition that pointed to this possibility.

Needless to say, while I might never discover the full context behind the conditions that brought my grandfather to Hungary, I am finding the uncovering of various parts of both his history and the larger Cold War context in which it was situated quite fascinating.  The next stop on my search is the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, located at New York University.  Josh informed me that I’ll be able to find there personal correspondence between my grandfather and other TWU leaders, photographs from his time as a labor leader in New York, and even some film footage of him in action.  I have a date set with an archivist there in October, and I look forward to sharing what I find.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Three Online Alter Egos

This is an article I wrote back in early 2007, when I was working full time on projects that utilized the virtual world of Second Life.  It was never published, and just resurfaced in my mind, so I figured I’d share.  Enjoy!

Wait, who am I? From left to right: Bhikku Beeks, Rafi Gkid, Theravada Young

Sometimes when I go to work, I wear jeans and a t-shirt.  Sometimes it’ll be more of a blazer and khakis kind of day.  On others I might go for something more formal, like a tuxedo.  Lately I’ve taken to dressing up as an elf, a sumo wrestler and a lava monster, depending on my mood.  I save my Godzilla costume for special occasions, like when I facilitate a workshop.  No, I haven’t been asked for my letter of resignation yet, though some of my colleagues do give me funny looks as they pass by my desk and see me talking to a mermaid.  I work in the virtual world of Second Life, an immersive three dimensional online environment populated by ‘residents’ from across the globe.  It is a place where the odd and surreal are the norm, and a place that is surprisingly rich with lessons about the nature of identity, if one looks at it from the right angle.

Second Life, to give a short and hopefully useful description, is essentially like a three dimensional internet.  Instead of going on Amazon.com to purchase SlaughterHouse-Five, you could have gone to hear an interview with its author in a virtual cafe´ with Vonnegut’s live voice streaming into your computer.  (This happened.)  Or, in addition to signing a petition denouncing the Bush administration’s foreign policy online, you can go and participate in a virtual sit in with hundreds of other people from across the globe, walking and chatting with them about how many different ways the Iraq War was botched.  Any physical space can be recreated, from your house in Massachusetts to the Empire State Building in New York to an island in Hawaii.  My organization has a space in this virtual world where we run educational workshops and programming related to global issues.  It’s a tropical island with a volcano in the center that erupts every couple of hours.  At this point I’ve stopped being distracted by the flying molten lava.

More important than the physical, though, is the social.  People sign on, choose names and create characters.  Avatars, as these are online physical representations of self have been dubbed, can be shaped to look any way a person can think of and are the point of contact and interaction with others that inhabit the space.  It’s the presence provided by these avatars that makes this new technology so compelling and fascinating.  Browsing the web, you’re by yourself.  In Second Life, the richest experiences arise out of the immediate interaction that’s made possible by the fact that you can simply walk up to someone and start talking.

It’s this aspect of the virtual experience, that of how we choose to represent ourselves and behave,  that I thought would be most interesting to discuss from the perspective of my own meditation practice.   One of the core ideas in the Buddhist tradition is that the self is not something that is static amidst our experience, something we’re born with and stays with us, but rather it’s understood that identity is more verb than noun, and self as something that is constantly created, dissipates and is reformulated, even on a moment to moment basis.  Rafi the hockey player disappeared about 10 years ago, but can just as easily pop back into existence as I pick up a hockey stick or maybe even when I recall a harsh memory of being cross checked…

In our daily lives, we create many different selves.  As siblings.  Friends.  Cooks.  Advocates.  Scholars.  Meditators.  The list goes on and on.  We have sets of things associated with different selves.  Clothes.  Paraphenalia.  Mementos.  Behaviors.  Patterns of thought.  The process of creating these selves is fluid and organic, it comes to us almost automatically, and unfortunately, often without much thoughtful intention.

In the online world, we do the same thing, though often in somewhat less fluid a manner.  We create work and personal email addresses, sometimes numerous of each over the years.  Some of us might have profiles on various social networking sites, some relating to friend circles, some to university communities, others to our professional lives, still others to various interests we have like photography, social justice, or music.  In each of these instances we recreate ourselves, our identity, sharing bits that are pertinent and leaving out others depending on the context and on who we might think is viewing ‘us’.

Second Life and other 3D immersive environments like it, though, simply reach a new level of ’selfing’ that previously has been unimaginable.   As I mentioned, so often our identities are not formed with a great deal of intention.  They can come to being in an ad hoc, on the fly, sort of way.  Second Life does not provide you with this luxury.  You start off with numerous blank slates which force you to be somewhat more intentional than you often might be offline, mainly because pretty much everything about you and your world is not established.

To start with, you have no name, and simply choosing your “real life” first and last name is not possible due to the sign up structure that allows you to create any first name you like, but has you choose from a varying list of last names.  Before you’ve even entered the world, you’re already operating under an alter ego of sorts.   Physically you’re also practically undefined at the start.  You first choose whether you want a basic male or female avatar, and then go on to change it in whatever way you decide you want to, whether it be into a squirrel wearing a baseball cap, a martini drinking frank sinatra look alike, or a golden, multi-armed Hindu goddess. (I’ve seen this avatar, it’s pretty awesome!)

Aside from the physical blank slate is the social one.  Signing into Second Life can often feel like arriving in a new city and not knowing anybody or where anything is.  You have to figure out, using whatever resources you have, what you want to do and how you want to do it.  We’re essentially offered the rare opportunity of  re-inventing ourselves.

Obviously, though, people are not coming in with nothing, they still possess their entire pantheon of personal habits and histories, talents and interests, and soon enough people find their way and likely do things that they often do in some context offline.  They might go to political rallies, live music events, attend an arts class, go dancing, or even have sex. (Yes, sex is a pretty large part of Second Life, it still being the internet and all…)  But they’re doing so in the context of this alter ego character that is always on the screen before them as they move around.  The avatar literally takes on the role of their virtual ’self’.  And it’s in that context that the most interesting things occur in terms of identity formation and self perception.

Some natural questions arise at this point as to why this phenomenon of the avatar is actually something distinct in the scheme of things.  Sure, it’s neat technology, and somewhat odd on occasion to be sure, but identity creation and formation have existed since the first sentient being, and have taken on a multitude of permutations over the course of history.   Actors are constantly creating and taking on new identities on stage, on Halloween and Purim millions dress up to ‘become’ others, authors have used pen names with distinct voices for centuries.  What makes this type of projective identity distinct?  A large part of the answer to this question has to do with the physicality (at least visually) of the avatar, as well as the fact that it is not our body.

Though still in its infancy, research is beginning to emerge on some of the effects of avatar usage in virtual environments.  In a recent paper titled The Proteus Effect, researchers at Stanford University outline how the ways that people perceive themselves as looking (ie – what they think their avatar looks like) in virtual worlds effect how they end up interacting with others.  In one study, participants alternately controlled attractive and unattractive avatars with which they then interacted with a confederate.  While the participants were aware of the attractive or unattractive state of their avatars, the confederate was blind to that condition and always saw a participant with an average face.  The study found that participants in the attractive condition on average moved physically closer to the confederates and were willing to share more personal information with them than in the unattractive condition. (Note: the ‘attractiveness’ of the face was pre-tested by separate participants, not arbitrarily determined by the researchers.)

In another study the height of the participant’s avatar was altered, still with the confederate being blind to the condition and always seeing the participant’s avatar as being the same height while the participant saw themselves as shorter or taller.  The participant and confederate then engaged in a negotiating exercise.  It was found that participants in the taller condition were significantly more willing to make unfair offers than participants in the shorter condition, and those in the shorter condition were were significantly more willing to accept unfair offers than those in the tall condition.

This study, and others like it, are showing that there are significant behavioral changes associated with avatars, that the way we choose to construct our virtual identities, even just on the physical and visual levels, will change the ways we behave and relate to others in those environments.  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.  What happens when you start to mix in other factors like the use of multiple avatars, or of one person having multiple accounts each with a different name and social history?

Rafi Gkid, Bhikku Beeks and Theravada Young (forgive my penchant for Buddhist names) are all iterations of Rafi Santo, but each of them are, to some degree, different people online.  Rafi Gkid lives in the teen only version of Second Life, where he’s locked to the educational island of the non-profit organization Global Kids.  He’s young, makes corny jokes, runs workshops about international affairs and has strong social networks that include teens from around the globe.  Bhikku Beeks also works for Global Kids, but is significantly older than Rafi Gkid; with long grey hair, a lanky frame and elf ears, he is evocative of a mage character from a fantasy novel.  He lives in the adult area of Second Life, where he networks with other educators, does presentations on his work and visits other educational environments to learn best practices.  Theravada Young is a middle aged black woman who has spiky charcoal hair.  She’s my ‘recreational’ avatar, for when I have something I want to do or see in Second Life, but don’t want to be “at work” while doing so.  She has some gender and ethnic identity issues, having a female body of a person of color but identifying both online and off as a white male.

What’s neat about these personas is that each of them is uniquely intentional.  Like the previously mentioned multiple online selves that we intentionally construct through various email accounts and social networking profiles, these are each compartmentalized, but unlike with an email address, I’m taking actions through an ‘other’ self.  And in each of them, the types of places I go and things I do are different, as are the ways that I interact with others, both consciously and, I’m sure, otherwise.  Watching how this manifests is always fascinating, and my ’selves’ continually surprise my ’self’.

The opportunity that I see in Second Life from a Buddhist practice perspective is that millions of people are doing online what they do offline all the time, creating selves.  The major difference, I believe, is that online the process of doing so is more evident and even transparent, and those millions of people can see that they’re doing just that, creating something, and begin to ask some key questions:  Is this me?  Is maybe part of it me, and part of it not?  If it’s not me, then who is it?  Until they finally get to that ultimate koan : Who am I?

As more and more people begin to spend time online in virtual worlds, as well as in other online spaces where there is self representation and creation involved, there will be many unintended effects on both the personal and then societal levels.  It is my hope that amongst these myriad effects will be a resurgence in mainstream dialogue related to these core questions of who we are and what the idea of self is, and hopefully, out of that, we might even get to a place as a culture where we don’t take our egos quite as seriously.  It might be a long shot, but hey, in virtual worlds pigs can and do fly.

At a staff meeting early in the year, perhaps September, my colleague Tabitha mentioned something that was bothering her. She said that she loved how we did these interesting issue-based digital media production programs with teens, but felt that they were missing out on being exposed to other teens doing similar things. They were in isolation, without community or a sense of being part of a larger movement of youth production and participation using new media.

Later in the year, in January, we had a really productive introductory meeting with MOUSE, a national youth development organization that focuses on technical computer skills. Amongst many other things we talked about was an idea they put forth about having some of their students and some of our students get together at the end of the year to share their work. Everyone was interested; we all had the same need for our students.

Then, as we launched our Playing 4 Keeps serious game design program in a number of sites with the New York Public Library system, we realized that we’d want to have a culminating event where the students at each of the sites could present their game designs.

Finally, at the annual MacArthur grantee meeting in February, we connected with the Social Science Research Council, who was working with Parsons to facilitate intensive design sessions, called Charettes, to create youth learning environments, and was intent on having a youth Charette as part of that process.

After some initial emails and a lot of large conference calls, we had a partnership between Global Kids, MOUSE, New York Public Libraries, SSRC, Parsons and the Boys and Girls Club and created what’s now been dubbed Emoti-Con, the New York City Digital Youth Media Festival, also known as (o.o) for short. (See videos from the event here). It featured youth from a variety of programs across this city sharing and commenting on each others’ media creations, a game design challenge from the P4K sites, a youth design charette and a professional fair where the youth met with people in various pro-social and technology fields. All that, from a comment in a staff meeting. Powerful.

The second example I’ll share was an idea born in early 2008 that struck me like a bolt of lightening. I had been looking at our various afterschool programs and their structure, and thinking about some of the aspects inherent to all of our digital programs up to that point. In our work with game design in Playing 4 Keeps and machinima in the Virtual Video Project, we focused on a single medium and a long term year long design and production project. While these design aspects have huge advantages in terms of developing intensive skills, impressive media projects and a clear narrative for the program, there are also challenges with retention, production schedules, and having enough time to get as much issue based learning in as we might like. The thought I had, which I wrote up in a couple of pages for an internal memo, was to create something like this:

A comprehensive media arts afterschool program in which students learn to express themselves via a variety of media (photo, video, blog, comic, music, podcast, map mashups, games, etc) about the global issues important to them while at the same time explicitly developing their new media literacies (appropriation, networking, distributed cognition and judgment as primary) and addressing the ethical questions of what it means to be growing up digital (authorship and ownership, credibility, identity and participation as being primary).

The basics tenets of the program were to move from one medium to many, from one long term project to many short term projects, from implicit skill development to explicit skill development, and to leverage the existing curriculum development work happening at MIT’s Project New Media Literacies and Harvard’s GoodPlay project. The idea was well received, but largely set aside for lack of resources.

Then, in August 2008, we were contacted by Project New Media Literacies, with whom we already had a strong relationship, to see if we’d be interested in becoming a pilot site to test out prototypes of their Learning Library and the curriculum on developing these new literacies that they’d developed. Immediately we had a potential model in mind, and with some internal resource juggling, over the course of the past year we were able to develop Media Masters, a program that brought together new media literacy development with media production around global issues, and is almost perfectly described by the paragraph above. Moving forward, the work we did in the program to think about how social media can be leveraged for youth development around global issues is already deeply informing our programming and future projects, all that, from an idea that bubbled up and was nothing more than words on a page a year prior.

So, going into this new year at work, and in life, I’ve decided to pay close attention to ideas, to not write things off, to listen to that random thought that seems pie in the sky, and see where things might go from there.

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to check out their seasonal show, now for the second time, and gotten a real sense of the incredible spirit of creativity, innovation, experimentation, playfulness and collaboration that characterizes the program and its students.  At the show there are tons of projects, ranging from innovative interfaces to tech art, pro-social technologies, mobile applications, wearable technology, robots making art, and much more.  Some seem immediately ripe for either venture capital, application in the classroom, or installation in a museum.  Others are more whimsical, and might never make it to a broader public, but will inform the discourse around interactive media and the way it shapes society. It’s a real playground for those interested in the next generation of odd, interesting and thought provoking technology.  You can check out the photos I took from the show in the slideshow below, but for full effect you should check them out with my notes on my flickr stream.