Kate Anthony

OTI Europe Ltd | Consultancy, Personal Training and Research for Online Therapeutic Services

   
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Being Virtually Homeless

September 24, 2014 by Kate Anthony

Avatars and virtual environments have been on my mind a lot lately: we recently relaunched our Avatar Identity Specialist Certificate; I finally got around to finishing the book Infinite Reality; and a recent question to the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy on the topic from a colleague led to the organisation making it their research enquiry of the month.  This allowed me to revisit my own writings on the subject, and reflect on past experiences that feed into my thirst for understanding how different technologies fit into the lives of others.

On Sunday of this week, it was my absolute pleasure to join DeeAnna in a shop in Second Life (SL) to choose our new virtual office furniture.  Since our previous SL landlady moved on to other projects and closed her Snapshot shopping_001beautiful island, we have been virtually homeless for around six months, both of us feeling out-of-sorts and ungrounded within an important part of our work – the virtual world.  If you have ever been homeless, as I have, you will know exactly what I mean. And if you haven’t, I promise you it’s not exactly a bundle of fun emotionally (quite apart from practically, of course).

To borrow the name of one of my favourite bands, it makes one feel “uncluded”.  I’m not going to exaggerate my experience – it was temporary, during the summer, and mercifully only for a matter of a few weeks – but it certainly gave me an outlook on life that enabled me to understand why people seek communities and environments created by those on the outside of mainstream society.  And what technology has enabled us to do, at least in the developed world, is to seek those out and be part of them virtually.

In our search for a new island in Second Life, I looked at spaces next to graffiti-covered biker bars, got thrown out and banned from a house of a, ummm, shall we say a “private” nature, and gatecrashed a virtual wedding.  I fell into virtual fountain and virtually almost drowned. I met an aardvark who then googled my avatar name and emailed me for therapy. I went to virtual Paris and bought a virtual croissant from a virtual vendor who bizarrely only spoke Spanish. These were interesting experiences, but none of them made me feel included.

So we turned to our dear colleague Gentle Heron, who runs Virtual Ability Island and who had available land for rent – you may remember her from the documentary film Login 2 Life and the feature she wrote for us for TILT Magazine.  We now have space in SL which could have been made for us – a therapeutic community, with a conference centre and cafe for our students to hang out in (office-warming party coming soon!), and a beautiful building with roof garden, library, therapy room, Reiki centre, and TILT’s headquarters .  It’s a work in progress as DeeAnna and I find time to shop together inworld from our offline offices either side of the Atlantic  – but it gets more like our virtual home every day.

I am very used to the odd looks I get when trying to describe the virtual living so many people partake in – it’s why we ask the majority of our students to experience it for themselves as part of their Foundational Course in Cyberculture.  We don’t need to have the same experiences as clients to empathise with them, but we do need to understand how they live.  If the community of the virtual world is where they feel included – rather than uncluded – then who are we to dismiss that as being unreal?

🙂

 

 

TILT’s Yin and Yang

May 6, 2014 by Kate Anthony

Stuart Miles yin yang

Ever noticed how DeeAnna’s blog is pertier than mine?!

Those of you familiar with Therapeutic Innovations in Light of Technology will be familiar with our in-house style. We put as much care into how TILT looks as we do soliciting interesting and dynamic content for you. Our dedicated team of columnists know what we want, and apart from a few images here and there which just can’t live up to the high technical specifications of producing the magazine, we do our contributors justice, we feel.

But you may be interested in just how the yin and yang of DeeAnna and I actually fits into its production, from coming up with the title itself to every issue you have read.

That’s not to suggest that DA and I are opposites – that is very much not the case. We share a philosophy and work ethic that has led to the steady growth of the Online Therapy Institute to be our life/work achievement since 2008, providing education and training not just in our core field of psychotherapy, but also our sister fields of coaching and complimentary health provision. We live 3,300 miles apart (and that’s as the crow flies, never mind the miles we tread searching for coffee and the occasional airport cocktail en route). We work five hours apart, meaning that we have to synch our day to take that into account when it comes to deadlines and check-ins with each other. And most importantly, we have to recognise each other’s strengths, and work to them accordingly.

With the production of TILT, my wordy yin plays to DeeAnna’s visual yang. Give me 100,000 words to edit or write, and I am a happy bunny. Ask me to come up with a visual that both illustrates and demonstrates a concept, and I will probably pack up my virtual bags and head for the Scottish Highlands to avoid you. It’s just not in my genetic make-up.

But of course, that isn’t a problem when it comes to producing TILT, because I have DeeAnna!

DeeAnna’s strength often lies in the visual. She can conceptualise what it is the words are trying to say, and then choose visuals to compliment and demonstrate the power of those words. An early adopter of Pinterest, she can see how online vision boards fit into our work, for example – whereas my Pinterest account still has two images pinned as far as I recall – Linlithgow Palace and the logo of an organisation I have forgotten. DeeAnna introduced me to PicMonkey, which she swears by, around four weeks ago and the tab is still open on my laptop untouched. I agonise over every image so far on this blog and still have no idea whether it conveys what I want it to.

So with TILT, I take first lead on submitted columns and features. I merrily edit away before uploading to Dropbox for DeeAnna’s turn. A folder of words sits waiting for the magic to happen.

And then poof – when DeeAnna’s visual yang kicks in, I see images aplenty uploading. We consult on the cover image only (which tends to consist of me ummming and ahhhhing a lot). We turn it over to our wonderful designer Delaine, and a new edition of TILT is born.

According to Wikipedia today,

“Yin and yang can be thought of as complementary (instead of opposing) forces interacting to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the parts.”

And, as a wordy kinda gal, that just about sums TILT up for me.
🙂

“Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net”.

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