Chronicle.com: Second Life rules!

The folks at the The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog has sure been interested in Second Life lately. Well, me too.

The first post describes a new “orientation island” where new visitors to the virtual world learn what it is about. The New Media Consortium has built their own orientation island, apparently because Linden Labs’ version doesn’t do that great a job in explaining some of the features of Second Life.



The second post summarizes Peter Ludlow’s interview with MIT Press. In the interview, Ludlow claims that Second Life is run by the “Greek God method.”

There’s no really set established policy, but they refuse to be completely hands off, too. So they reach in like Greek gods reaching down from Mount Olympus, and they dabble in stuff and screw around and get involved to bail out their friends. . . . It would be much better if they just stayed out completely because then there would be an opportunity for users to create their own governance structures.

This kind of outspoken political critique is par for the course for Ludlow. The Wired Campus Blog reports that he was kicked out of the Sims Online for criticizing the governance structure there.

I’m sympathetic with Ludlow’s desire to see what would happen if Second Lifers could rule themselves, but right now I wonder if the connections between virtual worlds and the real world are too close for Linden to allow something like that. They have an interest in keeping the site somewhat similar to the real world.

Michael Wesch’s “Information R/evolution”

Michael Wesch of “The Machine is Us/ing Us” has posted a new video “Information R/evolution.”

I think the thing to take away from the video is that information is now free of the desktop metaphor. Early in the video, he slams Yahoo for making a “shelf” online, and he celebrates that now information can be in multiple “places.” This is hardly a new thought, but the presentation is accessible and a good conversation starter.

However, like with “The Machine is Us,” I have to take issue with the assumptions of Wesch’s new work. He asserts that the web makes it possible to have information without materiality, going so far as to claim that “we organize information without material constraints.” I get his point—the next bit of text points out that he has put the same bit of “information” in “three ‘places’ at once”—but that doesn’t make the data immaterial. As Katherine Hayles points out, no information is immaterial; it exists as magnetic states on hard drives and has to be accessed with computers via cables.

Anyway, Wesch does interesting stuff. And the soundtrack is awesome.

via Searchblog