Workshop review of the supporting convergent technology involved in the phenomena of Spirituality

Presenters: Luis Miguel Martínez & Pablo Martinez

Links:
"Second Life, Darwin & God"
tecnologías para el aprendizaje

Considering that online worlds have served as community enablers, the present research traces convergence lines between resident's activities inside this platforms and the possibilities that those activities can be understood as spiritual practices. Within the context of Second Life, we adopted an operative approach to spirituality. The former implies that we take user's actions and concrete manifestations (such as meeting places inside Second Life) as windows for identifying spiritual content and activities within SL.
The first question tries to establish the relation that these kind of computer mediated communication platforms, beyond institutionalized religious practices (that is, conceptually limited groups related to a belief corpus -Christian, Buddhist, Catholic, etc...-), involve belief-based interaction beyond pre-conceived narratives such as the bible. How does SL involve a process of belief? After the recognition of existing concessions of certainty upon the experiences shared among participants of Immersive Worlds, we stepped into more specific content and practices related to spirituality. If SL and other immersive worlds represent a space where issues such as economical competition, political debates, authority vacuums and crime, take place on an everyday basis, we agreed that we should not be surprised how different institutions (preexisting and SL based). Then, we explored the way in which in Second Life spirituality is expressed. For this we interviewed some avatars in some more explicit religious places. Second Life could be a possible source of information about the believes of youngsters and adolescents (but, considering the age of users, an average of 30 years, we identified a broader scope). The problem is that we have to make a difference between the avatar and the way he or she expresses him or herself and the persons beyond the avatar. This is related to the operative dissonances that manifest between on-line and off-line action.