My 50th birthday bash last night went off well - several old friends turned up, each with a bottle of wine for me (are they trying to tell me something...?) and a splendid time was had by all. Yesterday it was raining again, as it has every day since I got back from Bella Italia. It's been so bad (you know, raining Japanese car components) that a guy two doors down from me is actually building an Ark. Persistently precipitating. Not June weather at all.
So it was, in a slightly damp and depressed mood that I decided to venture off for a while into my Second Life to cheer myself up. All was going well until I fell off the side of a cliff, and tumbled down over into the side of a log cabin. It hurt! Not physically of course - I'm still able to walk without a limp. But it hurt psychologically. I wouldn't have believed it until it happened to me. But there you have it. Second Life and other 3-D virtual worlds can be damaging to your sense of well-being. The embodied mind does extend beyond the physical body and into the technological extensions we employ, whether mobile phone, blog, or avatar. I recall reading Andy Clark's book 'Natural Born Cyborgs', and he voiced similar ideas. Well, I'm not disagreeing with him, now I have the mental contusions as evidence....
Access Andy Clark's musings here.
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