Robin Has Enough Of It

As I ran into another, as yet unclarified issue with posting my last Discussion Hour to the Events calendar, where my text* was refused and refused again until I had whittled it down to a single sentence, I decided to once more ask Robin for a clarification. Instead I got this:

Laetizia, I really, really don’t want to have this conversation again.

Well me neither, honestly. I am sick and tired of the subject and all the conflicting signals I have been getting around the Discussion Hours these weeks. But out comes the background:

I know you don’t agree that we should do this, but I’m afraid our lawyers disagree.

Right. Well I can’t argue with lawyers - everyone knows that is an impossibility. They don’t deal with language in the way a professional like me does, but in a deceptive way, to find loopholes and cover asses. So that’s what it’s all about. The Dutch say that you are contaminated by whom you deal with, and to illustrate that ancient wisdom, allow me to highlight one more point Robin made.

Laetizia Coronet: Robin, there is no list of forbidden words/ letter groups in Events?

Robin Linden: There’s no list of letter groups anywhere.

Laetizia Coronet: Robin, now really! I have proof of there being one. [I]n a test with Classifieds I got a notice saying ‘loli’ is a banned letter group. Now if that is one, there is a list.

Robin Linden: Loli isn’t a letter group in this context, it’s short hand for a role-playing character.

Note how she doesn’t mention words and instead sticks to the letter groups to debunk that and thus ignore the main question. Objection, Your Honor! No wonder she wanted to talk about voice instead - it’ll take away the ease with which we can read back and pick apart her slippery statements.

Send Them A Postcard

 Chadrick Linden suggested last night that banning words from Classifieds was ‘not scalable’ (now how many Lindens have used that phrase already in the past few weeks?) so I suspect he was not talking about the same thing I was talking about. Steadfastly mentioning ‘gambling’ and ‘casino’ as examples (an not ‘loli’ or ‘lolita’), he said that they are looking at ways to check types of businesses instead of words. If so, good job - but how scalable is that going to be?

Meanwhile, to keep the issue going, here’s a postcard for you all:

(original photograph: the North Alamo water tower, uncredited, from this site. There is a similar one in Lolita, Texas, but all I found was a tiny, grainy .GIF of that one. New lettering courtesy of Photoshop.)

Download it, then upload it (or just ask me for it in-world if you don’t want to spend 10 L$…), send it to your favourite Linden, stick it on a prim (dimensions 4:3 for the best result), place it on your house or in your sim, spread it!

Finding Facts

So, is there or is there not a list of words which are not acceptable for use in Classifieds and Events? Well… yes and no. I posted an event in the calendar at my usual time slot of Tuesday noon SLT, announcing a discussion of the book Lolita by Nabokov, and the website took my event. It also shows up in-world when searching for events on the 10th. Searching for Lolita won’t work though, but it must be said that in Events, searching for words doesn’t work well at all (you can only find an event if you know the first word of the name of it - in my case ‘Discussion’). It remains to be seen if my Events listing will survive the first workday of the week though.

‘Words’ part two: Daniel Linden speaks.

During a short office hour (due to Daniel coming late, confusion about the location of his office hours and the rolling restart) I got to fire some questions at Daniel about the issue of blocking words from Search. So did we get clarity on the issue? Well, it’s Daniel, the man who coined the term ‘broadly offensive’, so don’t expect too much…

Words

I’m a linguist. The prims of my daily life are words. Words to build into sentences, words to translate into other languages, words to express my feelings and thoughts. Few things in this world are as pliable as words. Especially in the realm of art and culture.

In 1954, 53 years ago, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a masterpiece of 20th century literature: Lolita. It is the story of an older man falling in love with Dolores, the twelve year old daughter of his landlady. Nabokov at first couldn’t find a publisher in the US and the book was initially banned in the UK and France after publication there. It became, however, a bestseller upon publication in the US in 1958.

It seems that after all these years the book can still kick up a storm. Or at least the subject matter for which the title has become a symbol: underage girls who are sexually attractive. And so Linden Labs has banned the word from the Search function. But, as with many words, Lolita means more than just that. For starters, it still is first and foremost the title of a great work of literature. But there is much more - here’s the Wikipedia disambiguation page. That doesn’t mention, of course, the 101 avatars called Lolita in Second Life (you can still search for them in the People and All tabs.)

The banning of words raises a few questions and the first one is obviously where this is going to stop. Anyone who has ever read the novel, knows the word nymphet which Nabokov’s main character uses to describe girls like Lolita, i.e. exactly the type of sexually attractive underage girls deemed offensive by Linden Labs. So are we going to ban nymphet too (killing Nymphetamine in the process) and, if not, why not? And what other words are out there which can be seen as offensive? SS perhaps? Just have a look at another disambiguation page.

Another important question raised by the practice of banning words is that of effect. Practices and/or articles described by the banned words will not vanish at all - they just disappear off the radar, making them that much harder to find. That may deter some people with the wrong intentions from finding them, but as in any society there will be networks operating under the radar, ready to help the initiated to find what they’re looking for. All it takes is a location and a time, posted on a non-SL forum somewhere. And Linden Labs will be none the wiser.

And so the whole concept of banning words restricts the use of Second Life in many ways. I can’t advertize Japanese fashion, I can’t host a discussion of the famous Nabokov novel and the good people of Lolita, Texas can’t ever hope to open a virtual community in Second Life. Our freedom of expression is directly affected by all this. And it will not have the desired effect.

I will host a discussion about banning words on my barge MS Parkkade in Tamarind Bay on Tuesday, 12 PM (noon) SL time (that’s 21:00 CET). I would especially like to hear what better ways there are to fight what’s deemed ‘broadly offensive’, if at all necessary. Any ideas on how to fight this Linden Labs policy will be welcome too - because I for one am convinced that this is a grave error, setting a nasty precedent.