Connecting to the (virtual) ground: between groundedness and groundlessness in Second Life

Abstract

The ground as the solid surface of the earth, as the land that lies under our feet and as the foundation on which anything built rests, has always served as a condition of a possibility of place. Heaviness and gravity on the one hand, and the attempts to overcome them through high-rise constructions on the other, define physical space and create different sorts of spatial relationships. Now that mobility and connectivity have introduced a new dynamism and flexibility, and the attention increasingly shifts from the one and only ‘native’ ground to multiple material and immaterial conditions that shape our existence, the question is whether the attachment to the ground refers to the materiality of the ground itself or to some sort of phantasmatic background context. In a world that is less about place and more about places, less about origins and more about connections between the different sites of our lives, the notion of ‘groundedness’ mediates between materiality and symbolism. Similarly to physical space, cyberspace is also capable of creating a ‘there’ and a place, establishing new geographies and different sorts of attachment. Are we then moving from a conscious attachment to a native ground and a single home, to a multiplicity of places, grounds, and, if possible, ‘homes’? This attachment to the ground is the focus of this essay. It mediates between groundedness and groundlessness: from the Heideggerian ‘being in the world’ as ‘being on the earth’ and the understanding of the ‘native ground’ as a repository of meanings and memories, to flying in the physical world and studying an avatar's weightless existence in virtual worlds. By using examples taken from the virtual world of Second Life, it aims to question the symbolisation of the ground, and through this, to explore the forms that placeness takes within digitisation.