Alternate Universe

Second life is emerging as a powerful new medium for social interactions of all sorts, from romance to making money. It may be the internet next big thing. 

• Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 8,786,822 Residents from around the globe.

• The people who are coming to this online universe aren’t just socializing, however. They’re also doing business, collaborating on research, teaching courses, or even dating.

• A recent Dutch study found that 57 percent of Second Lifers spend more than 18 hours a week there, and 33 percent spend more than 30 hours a week. On a typical day, customers spend $1 million buying virtual clothes, cars, houses and other goods for their avatars, and total sales within this virtual economy are now growing at an annual rate of 10 percent.

• By 2011, four of every five people who use the Internet will actively participate in Second Life or some similar medium, according to Gartner Research, which recently did a study looking at the investment potential of virtual worlds. (This means 1.6 billion-out of a total 2 billion Internet users- will have found new lives online.)

• “It’s basically Tom Friedman’s flat world.” (In his book, The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman describes the unplanned cascade of technological and social shifts that effectively leveled the economic world)

• “It’s globalization of the virtual world.

 Advantages 

1. With its large, densely settled population, which allows for division of labor, and citizens universally armed with ownership rights and the tool to produce just about anything, Second life is in some way the ideal free market.

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  • Linden Lab’s “no control” policy allows for any income made inside Second Life to be cashed out through the company into U.S. dollars.( Linden Lab is the company that operates Second Life)
  • Linden Lab has also relinquished all intellectual-property rights to creations in its world, spurring entrepreneurship.

1. The multinational companies are using Second Life to

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  • Hold staff meetings where avatars representing employees can discuss ideas via instant message, email or Skype.
  • More than 45 multinational companies, including the likes of American Apparel, IBM, General Motors and Dell are beginning to use the medium for customer service, sales and marketing.
  • With face-to-face interaction on the decline in offices- where it’s easier to e-mail or videoconference than schedule a live meeting-and companies increasingly use the Web for everything from distribution to customer service, a virtual world offers the potential to form relationships that are far more personal than online forms or e-mail.

     

1. Educational and research tool,

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  • More than 250 universities, including Harvard and MIT, now operate distance-learning programs in Second Life.

1. It empowers people. (social freedom)

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  • Newcomers agree to a list of several do’s and don’ts, but within the communities they form, Residents can impose their own codes of conduct.
  • The power of Second Life lies in its utility for the gamut of human activities. It’s a potent medium for socializing- it provides people with a way to express, explore, and experiment with identity, venture their frustrations, reveal alter ego.
  • “Brigadoon,” for instance, is a Second Life island inhabited by a group of adults who suffer from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism characterized by awkward, eccentric and obsessive behavior. In Second life, these patients are learning to interact in ways that would be terrifying for them in real life.

 However, 

• Not everyone is convinced that Second Life is a good thing.
• Some critics are uneasy with the idea of people’s getting more and more of their social activity online because virtual worlds don’t have the nuance of face-to-face interaction.
• It all depends, of course, on whether you see Second Life’s taking the place of ordinary social interaction or supplementing it, or as just another kind of diversion.

  

• All in all, whether you think it’s a pale imitation of reality or a vivid world of the mind, it’s captivating the globe.

 publisher: pear