Second Life not “real”; users sad, lonely deviants

Morgan Clendaniel has a new article in Good Magazine on Second Life, arguing that, as the highly-lauded next wave of the internet, the virtual world is a disappointment, going virtually (ha!) unused; except, of course, for the naughty areas. Also, Second Life aficionados are depressed (and depressing) losers.

I believe the first point is the most valid and interesting. Clendaniel points out the site’s relatively few users.

Since it launched, Second Life has been hailed as a glimpse of how we will someday interact, shop, and even live. With email and online shopping now commonplace, virtual worlds are the new cutting edge of online business and buzz. “In many ways, Second Life is the next step of the internet,” says Jeska Dzwigalski, a community manager with Linden. “[In the future], having a virtual presence will be as ubiquitous as mobile phones or email addresses or a web page is today. It’s the evolution of the internet.” Right now there are almost 9 million accounts, but at even at peak times (4 p.m. Eastern—presumably, the most avid users don’t have jobs) there are only 40,000 users logged on. That means the future of the internet is only grabbing enough people to fill a baseball stadium. While that number has been slowly growing, think about this: If just a little under 1 million users have logged in during the last 30 days, that means there are 8 million others who tried Second Life and haven’t felt any need to come back.

While Clendaniel makes some good points about the site’s usage—40,000 visitors isn’t quite up to Facebook’s or Wikipedia’s numbers—the overall tone of the article seems reactionary. For instance, consider this paragraph on the ways that Second Life inhibits social relationships:

The paradox of a virtual world is that it adds human interaction to the online experience, while at the same time making sure you never have to actually interact with anyone. Now, instead of merely buying a book on a website, you can browse a virtual bookstore along side other virtual patrons, without ever leaving your home. This logic—that you’d want to give up both the speed of online shopping and the social experience of actually shopping, that you’d want to spend time in a bookstore but not actually go to one—is depressing, to say the least. From there, it’s a small step to buying only virtual clothes for your virtual self while you sit at home in your underwear (which some people no doubt already do). The only thing you can’t get here is real-life sustenance, but with enough restaurants that deliver, you could conceivably never log out. What a future it could be.

I’m not quite sure how browsing a virtual bookstore at home in your underwear is any more depressing that browsing Amazon.com at home in your underwear. Additionally, Clendaniel doesn’t seem to understand the appeal of the site to its users. After asking one user why she doesn’t meet people in the real world, he snarks off her response (“Have you ever been to Oklahoma?”) as in-group snobbery.

The article’s biggest weakness, however, is that it is entirely based on Clendaniel’s own experience as a (new) user of Second Life. It’s hardly a scientific sample, and it makes his criticisms come off as uninformed.

Americans want the intenet in their brains

Zogby has released a new poll of Americans’ attitudes toward the internet.

To summarize: an alarming percentage of respondents are open to brain implants that allow them to access the internet with their minds and that allow their children's locations to be tracked, they think government censorship of online video content is acceptable, the internet makes them feel closer to God and less close their significant others - but their own identities on the internet are not very important to them. This is frightening stuff.

I guess I’m not as frightened by this as Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web (who wrote the summary above). It is interesting, however, that so many people are so open to such invasive technologies.

via Read/Write Web

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.

Computer-brain interaction

Today I saw two interesting stories dealing with computers and the brain. The first described a patent that Microsoft had applied for outlining a device that would measure brain waves while a subject tried out the company’s interfaces. The second story described a device for controlling a Second Life avatar using brainwaves. See a video of it in action below:

I think both are examples of rudimentary methods for bridging the gap between the physical world of atoms and the digital world of data. While there may be great uses for this kind of technology—who doesn’t want Microsoft to make better interfaces? who wants to use their hands to move a Second Life avatar?—both also suggest the ways that this kind of data can be mined for ends that nobody—particularly the user—can foresee. It will be fascinating to see how the public reacts to this technology.

via Boing Boing and Boing Boing

Related: Brain-to-machine algorithm