“More Things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio.” Seeing and Believing in Second Life

Abstract

As the twenty-first century in the United Stares plunges headlong into a tweeted, videoed, simulacra filled cyberspace, schools and colleges have tried to respond. One form of this response has been to move education and classrooms into a popular, virtual, avatar-land called Second Life. Students and teachers in Second Life have found themselves navigating pixilated space, though virtual bodies. They have been directly faced with a brave new world of being. As with the age of mechanical reproduction before it, the advent of these new methods of duplicating the world raise fundamental questions about the nature of reality, knowing and being. In this chapter I use metaphors from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to explore Second Life as a netherworldly educational space, both real and unreal. I raise questions about the meaning of the body in virtual classrooms, the kinds of interactions that this space affords, the boundaries of this consensual hallucination, and the nature of teaching and learning through interactive visual fiction/non-fiction. Referencing Shakespeare throughout, I interrogate this new space with old questions, as I ask, what we should perhaps see, what we should perhaps believe, who awaits us, and for whom might all of this truly be the way forward?