I want to draw some connections. The avatar isn’t a seperate creature, it is a different order of the self. Augmentation versus Immersion means nothing at this level. The avatar is the self that I can look at, that I can make an object of physical intuition, thereby (apparently) rendering the self complete, integrated, whole, something that can be ordered, understood, put in its place. But this objectification is doomed to fail as the subject is always becoming what it is (in a sense, it is always already virtual), which is to say, that a “fixed” subject is never available for objectification except in a degraded form (although, virtuality provides the illusion of this becoming as a genuine experience, the inescapable realization that I am *not* my avatar always collapses the avatar-as-subject-become-object complex) Nevertheless, the *desire* to experience the self as an object is always there and, for those of us who “enjoy” virtuality, that desire is more or less satisfied in Second Life. If you have ever wondered about the prevalence of BDSM in Second Life, this is the place to start but, as interesting (or not!) as that analysis might be, there is a more general relevance at play here.
Augmentation is an attempt to overcome virtuality by “grounding” one virtuality in another. What we call Real World identies are no less virtual than our Second Life identities in the sense that insofar as they exist they exist only symbolically, in language. Why is such a re-doubling of the virtual necessary for the augmentationist, what is being accomplished in this move?
once again, have to come back to this as I am working on my club which is becoming the ultimate cool looking explosion of light in SL 
