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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2015
We convince by our presence.
– Walt WhitmanAfter I signed onto Palace, I made my way down the hallway toward the study. As soon as I entered the room, I stopped dead in my tracks. What was going on here? I was standing in the middle of total blackness. Where were the comfy chairs, the chessboard, the bookshelves, the glowing fireplace? All I could see was my avatar owl standing in the middle of a featureless void. Was the Palace software suffering from some kind of glitch? Or was there maybe something wrong with my browser? I stepped back into the hallway. Reality popped back into existence. Everything looked normal there: the carpeted floor, the pictures on the wall. So I stepped back into the study. Sure enough, nothingness enveloped me once again. It was quite disorienting, as if I did not exist anywhere in particular. Then I noticed that the space was not a total vacuum. Along the perimeter of the emptiness I could see slivers of the room. Now I finally understood what was going on. Some mischievous person had painted black all over the walls, floor, and ceiling, while missing a few spots along the edges. “Clean” I said, invocating the command that wiped away anything users added to a room. Sure enough, the study reassuringly popped back into existence around me. Once more, it existed and I within it.
Be here now.
That is the advice from humanistic psychology on how to form meaningful relationships with others, to experience life more fully. Be right here, in this moment, wholly aware of this situation with your eyes, ears, nose, and skin, fully involved with both mind and body, thought and emotion – rather than placing one foot here while the other sinks into distracting ruminations about the past and future that fog our awareness of the here and now.
Be present.
That might be another way to put it. As Zen-like advice, it makes intuitive sense. But this notion was born in a time and place long before everyone started going online. So how do lifestyles in cyberspace address the principle of “be here now”?
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