Proper Treatment

I know someone in SL who frequently complains about the way people are “treating” them. I must admit that I’ve seen some not very nice behaviour from others towards them, but somehow that expression – “they treat me like …” – always gives me pause. English isn’t my first language, so it may well be that I’m imagining something here, but we have an exactly analogous expression in German, and I stumble over that one, too, whenever I hear it.

Maybe it’s because the verb “treat”, as well as its German equivalent, is also used in the sense of medical treatment. In other words, “treating” is what doctors do to their patients. And the word “patient” – forgive me for letting the language nerd in me roam freely here – has the same root as “passive”. (Incidentally, that root comes from the Latin word for “to suffer”.) So when I say “You treat me like a piece of garbage”, for me that makes it sound as if I were the passive recipient of your treatment, unable to do anything about it. Moreover, it makes it sound as if the way you treat me were entirely your responsibility and as if my role consisted solely in expecting or demanding a certain kind of treatment and in reacting with the appropriate reward or punishment, depending on whether I get that treatment from you or not.

Well, I think this is misleading, to say the least. People don’t just randomly decide how they are going to “treat” other people. It would be much more accurate to say that people are reacting to each other, which means that both parties have an active role in how their dealings with each other are going to play out. I’m not a patient etherized upon a table when it comes to the way people “treat” me. Rather, I’m actively shaping their reactions toward me.

This is true even in real life, even though I have only limited influence on the way I look, for example. If I look like Justin Timberlake people are going to react differently to me than they would if I looked like Margaret Thatcher. The sound of my voice and my accent are other things people react to which I can change only with considerable effort and only to a certain degree. Also, subtle and not so subtle reactions to my ethnic background may be among the things I can do little or nothing about. Still, it’s not as if I had no power at all over the impression I make. I can choose (within the limits of my budget) the way I dress; I can choose the way I talk and approach other people; I can choose to be friendly or unfriendly, respectful or arrogant, readily forgiving or forever bearing grudge, and these things are going to go a long way towards getting the kind of reactions from them that I wish for.

This is all the more true in Second Life where I have complete power even over that first impression that is triggered by my outward appearance. In SL, the way people react to me is to an even higher degree my own doing. For example, if a female avatar chooses as her everyday attire an outfit such as a pole-dancer might wear during the later stages of her performance, this is going to lead to a particular, predictable kind of reaction from others – and if that’s not the reaction she wants, why does she do it? And even some of our deeper limitations in RL don’t seem to apply in SL. I know a few people who suffer from all sorts of social anxieties in their real life. I would never have guessed that if they hadn’t told me. If you talk to them in SL, some of them are veritable fountains of sparkling wit and show an uncommon ability to form deep and rewarding friendships.

Those are the moments when Second Life really shines: when people who are hemmed in by all sorts of barriers in their real life become able to show their true qualities and receive the sort of “treatment” they deserve; when the faces we show to each other in the virtual world become a more accurate expression of our true selves than we are able to give in the real world.