When Flowers and Candy Just Won't Do

The short digital film World Builder Bruce Banit also contains some creepy implications about how both doctors and male lovers shape the world for passive, unconscious patients, so it was interesting to see it linked to the main web page for Cyber Therapy 2009. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about rhetorics of empowerment and disempowerment when it comes to medical applications for virtual worlds technologies by looking at individual case studies in which Second Life is used for support groups, counseling referrals, and patient advocacy organizations. I would argue that the virtue of the virtual has more to do with collective knowledge networking than it does to individual cave experiences and that health is about conscious sociality.