Lag

It is nice sunny morning and I am again speeding to Prague after long time. Again, it is a comfort of international train Eurocity Carl Maria von Weber, which is going from nearby Vienna, through my loved Moravia, then through Czech basin to Prague and later to Berlin and it terminates in Ostseebad Binz in neighboring Germany.

After the initial difficulties caused by usual delays, I am inside and I am fully enjoying drive in the first class and the second breakfast in dining car. The insolated landscape full of the fields is changing behind the train window. The fields have already yielded their fruits and there is only a contrast of brown (fields) and still green (trees and grass). It means that summer has no ended and autumn did not approach yet. We are just leaving Moravia due to the arrival to the Ceska Trebova station.

Since I get out not until ion Prague, I travel the pure distance 262 km = 262,000 m (162.80 mi = 286 526.68 yds). For instance, you can imagine that it is the distance of about 1,203 sims in Second Life. However, it is valid only in that case that we are moving along edges of squares in on direction. The question is where we would finish. One thing is certain; the teleport would take several seconds unlike RL. There we have to take into account time about 2 hours 48 minutes.

Somebody says in one Luc Besson’s movie: “Time plays no role.” Unfortunately, this premise is not valid either in RL or SL. We are dependent on time. Even we made it up ourselves. Time does not follow from any physical laws or any physical properties of our world or other worlds.

The next moment, the train stopped somewhere in a wasteland. There are any rails nearby. They run somewhere in other place, where time has stopped maybe. These rails are really there, but they are full of weed. Hell! Delay is increasing by another 20 minutes. It is totally already 50 minutes! Oh, we are not alone in this situation. The Super City Express Pendolino has stopped nearby us. Then we all are lost in the wasteland.

After that, it occurred to me that the preceding situation is an analogy with world of SL. Surely it is a lag! Tom Boellstorf written in his book:

… small talking about lag is like talking about the weather in rl [1].

Lag exited because Second Life, like all “massively multiply” virtual worlds during my fieldwork, was based on a “client-server” architecture, where most of the virtual world was housed on servers rather than the personal computers of residents [2].

It is therefore incorrect to assume that “everything in the new computer world is temporary and fleeting. … Time is now a resource, not a reference point.” [3]

I cannot move from my place, either in time or space. I am as a newbie – absolutely bare. I have nothing. I don’t know, what is happening. How it is working. Is there any hope?

Yes, it is. Courses for newbies.

References

1. T. Boellstorf: Coming of Age in Second Life An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 102
   
2. ibid, p. 103
   
3. ibid, p. 105

(It was written down in dining car of EC Carl Maria von Weber on 09.09.2009. It was served Prague’s omelet with roasted potatoes. Further, it was served Chardonnay, a sacramental wine from Archbishop's cellars in Kroměříž)