Stopping at the border
 "There's an evil force of vodka-sodden Mexicans thinking 'Reconquista'?" said Professor Michael Dear of the University of Southern California. "Doubtful."
Dear was referring to the clever Absolut Vodka ad that saw exposure south of the border but was taken, by people for whom the notion was convenient, as a sure sign of our nation's growing border problem with Mexico.
Dear was speaking at a recent Farmlab salon in downtown Los Angeles. Farmlab, an intellectually and botanically sprawling affair underneath the Spring Street bridge, hosts weekly lunchtime lectures for anyone who rolls in. Today, Dear discussed the state of the U.S./Mexico border at Tijuana and beyond.
First some numbers: The 2,000-mile border was cemented with the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, and by 1898 there were 258 markers, bookmarked by two marble "puntas initiales" at either end. Now there are 700 markers, some obscured and made redundant by fences and some sunk into the Pacific Ocean, and 700 miles of fence, mostly in urban areas like Tijuana, Mexicali, and Brownsville, TX.
 But despite fence complexes that in some case comprise three fences 30 feet apart from each other, one steel, one mesh, and one barbed wire, speaker Hector Lucero of Baja Caifornia's Cultural Affairs office said, "they don't deter border jumping."
North of Calexico there are graveyards of border crossers who didn't make it, collectively known as Juan Does.
But the border means somethig different the farther away one gets.
Indeed, trans-border citizens (people who daily cross the border for work), Dear said, view the border as a "two-hour Stop sign."
Dear said that border people, who live with the virtual or tangible border each day, view any proposed fencing with a shrug and see it as a logical next step, while the government in Mexico City is offended by the snub.
He also noted that the border is in itself a country. Mexicali was not connected by rail to Mexico City until 1948, and in many ways all border towns share more with the country they border than the country they belong to.
See also: FarmlabLabels: border, farmlab, los angeles, mexico
Are we our avatars?
 How does online technology shape community and identity, and do we have a chance to be more vital online than in real life?
Like the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1940s and 1950s, whose celebrities lived and worked in Brooklyn and were beloved of the neighborhood, the woman who voiced The Operator of the groundbreaking Alternative Reality Game/marketing phenomenon I Love Bees is allowed a more personal relationship with her fans.
"When I meet people at ARG events," said Kristen Rutherford, "I ask them what their gamer tag was before I ask them their name."
Rutherford is a hero to a small but intense community of Alternative Reality Gamers who grew to love and depend on her character when Microsoft launched I Love Bees as a marketing campaign for the game Halo 2 in the summer of 2004.
"To promote Halo 2, a narrative was created that would draw people down a rabbit hole," Rutherford said at today's Identity and Virtual Space: Are We Our Avatars? salon at Farmlab in downtown Los Angeles. "The reward is the story, and my character provided a lot of the exposition."
Rutherford spoke about the online gaming community as a dynamic hive, in which individual members, in the service of unfolding the I Love Bees story via telephone booths across the country, worked with unseen partners to complete the puzzle.
 "And when people meet The Operator, after this experience they had, they still tell me personal things about themselves," Rutherford said. "The experience was that important to them."
Rutherford says the narrative, even though it was a months-long advertisement for a video game, didn't shortchange its audience.
"It says, 'We won't make you feel stupid for believing in us,'" Rutherford said. "It's the only form of entertainment I know where I don't get the feeling of being talked down to."
 The salon was moderated by Stephen Johnson of G4TV, a tech and pop culture network owned by Comcast.
Sean Percival, author of “The Second Life Travel Guide," a handbook of virtual locations in the ARG Second Life, discussed avatars, digital representations of users in online forums and games, saying that a non-sophisticated avatar is every bit as ridiculous in the virtual world as highwater pants is in junior high.
"People can see you coming form a virtual mile away (with a "newbie" or "noob" avatar)," Percival said.
What was striking about the discussion was that it assumed a familiarity with fabricated identities and the need for keeping them. Second Life, in which one's avatar can buy and sell goods with virtual money that is paid for with an actual human being's credit card, and in which "islands" can be purchased by real-world corporations as advertising hubs, seems like a subscription-and-broadband-based do-over for a life less intriguing.
Percival is known as Sean Voss "inworld," as the Second Life community is known. He said that, unlike many gamers, his avatar looks similar to him.
"But I've talked to my share of men whose avatars are women, and vice versa," he said.
Toward the end of discussion, Percival admitted that participation in alternative reality communities might be compensatory.
"There are people here for romantic reasons," he said.
See also: Farmlab, G4TV's The Feed, Kristen Rutherford, Sean Percival Labels: ARG, authors, books, events, farmlab, G4TV, kristen rutherford, los angeles, sean percival, second life, stephen johnson, tech hysteria
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