Finished with First Life
MY SECOND LIFE
The video diaries of Molotov Alva
“In January 2007, a man named Molotov Alva, disappeared from his Californian home.
Recently, a series of video dispatches by a Traveler of the same name have appeared within a popular online world called Second Life.”
Filmmaker Douglas Gayeton came across these video dispatches and put them together into a documentary of seven episodes.
The ideas in this video aren’t for the ill-at-ease about the future of virtural living. You’ll need an open mind; you ‘ll want to suspend disbelief that someone could, and in fact has left behind a real life for a second life.
Identity Verification in Second Life
“Trust is the foundation of any community. And one cornerstone of trust is identity. You’ve got to know something about the person you are dealing with before you can trust them. Knowing who to trust in an online environment presents unique challenges. Traditionally Second Life users have based their trust on relationships built over time, and often on some basic verification such as ‘Payment Info on File’.” Second Life Website
This is an interesting development, one of the many challenges of online environments. Read more about how Linden Labs is handling identity verification.
“AOL-ify” Second Life
In this article “Second Life: The Promise and the Paradox,” Sibley Verbeck, CEO of the virtual worlds development firm The Electric Sheep Co., suggested AOL-ifing SL to make it more comprehensible. I have to agree. AOL made the World Wide Web and its backbone, the Internet, a friendly, immediately useful “place.” Because SL is created by its residents, its got a kind of backdoor element to it. If you get in and hang out, you’ll know what’s up, where to go and what to do. If you start at Orientation Island, alone, you’re bound to be flying around alone for what seems like eternity but is really 2 hours, (lots ‘o time for most busy folk).
We’re hoping the pICTsl Farm’s website and SL presence has an AOLifying affect for those who prefer it.
Social Circles in SL
This is one of the millions of thinking-outloud kind of conversations the blogosphere generates, people posting and commenting, posting and commenting. As an aside, I don’t think the social Flat Web is going away soon. While most folks commented on what didn’t work about this emerging model, I think it’s a good place to start thinking about thinking about SL. Did I say that’s what the Farm’s aimin’ ta do? It why we don’t have an elaborate build. There’s just soooooo much thinking needed, some of us just gotta’ hang out on the porch and contemplate…
This History of Earth and Life on Earth Exhibit
“Cosmo Priestman, Ourania Fizgig and ScubaChris Wollongong take us through The History of Earth & Life on Earth Exhibit, created as part of a non-major undergraduate intro-astrobiology course, Exploring Life in the Universe. Students in the ASTR202 (spring 2007) class helped to design and build a scale model installation work on the timeline of Earth, 4.6 billion years ago to the present. Embedded in this timeline are important landmark events in planet formation, geology, biology, and anthropology.”
This was a great installation, with some great simulations. The walk through the spiral, the distance between each exhibit, simulated the time between each development. There were plenty of sims and 3D models within the installation, such as meteors, rain and organisms. A great example of what students can do in SL. Building simulations is one way students learn about the phenomena the sim models. Search this region in the Search LivingintheUniverse (30, 190, 251).
Colleges Are Building in Second Life, but Is Anyone Visiting?
This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education also links to others in which business and academia are questioning the ROI in building a virtual presence in SL.
Read Why I gave up on Second Life
And How Madison Avenue is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life. “IBM has created a massive complex of adjoining islands dedicated to recruitment, employee training, and in-world business meetings.” I toured the IBM complex with one of its designers. Quite impressive from a design perspective. But when we got to the customer consulting area, complete with service reps waiting to answer our every question, my thought was: “Who comes here? And why?”
I’m not shooting myself in the foot by publishing these as we launch the pICTsl Farm. They reaffirm my intuition, SL and professional experience that SL is not ready for “prime time” particularly in educational contexts where resource constraints of all kinds create a miserable environment for getting at the real potential of a social sim, such as SL.
Is it live or is it Memorex?
You know how old you are if you recognize this phrase. It helps us look historically at how long we’ve been living in a mediated and represented world and how rapidly it’s changed in the last 30 years.
(It was an advertisement for a cassette tape, a technological innovation in the 70s. It preceded CDs.) The other day I walked by an elegant home furnishings store and noticed a tall faux torch. I immediately registered it as fake. It didn’t occur to me to classify it any other way but as fake. The thoughts which followed went something like this:
I bet there are people who have never seen a “real” torch. Would they immediately classify this one as fake, as I do? My friends have homes with a lot of fake things. The “real” things, often their materials, are unattainable, unavailable or undesirable. Most of my peers (40s-50s, middle class) have experienced real torches, stone walls, wood floors, house plants, etc.. I wonder how many of us have stopped acknowledging the distinction between real and fake and in what contexts of our lives this happens. And in what contexts does is matter?
I still have one cognitive foot firmly planted in Europe (having lived there for 9 years). I realize in hindsight one of my core connections (after living previous to that in southern California for 15 years) is to the sense of the authentic and real. Europeans take pride in the fact that the real stuff is there and the fake stuff is here (a particular generation of them do, anyway.)
Now I’m spending most of my waking hours in or around Second Life, which is only a gradation of the simulated world we live in. I highly recommend Sherry Turkle’s, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Written in 1995, it puts Second Life in historical perspective. A psychologist by training, Turkle blends thought from philosophy, computer and social sciences to paint a thought provoking perspective on Second Life, 10 years before it existed.
She offers a palatable description and analysis of our evolving simulated world and experiences of it. Why can’t we have both the real and the fake torch, the Disneyland and the Florida Everglades or zoo-ed alligator? Without an historical perspective, we have difficulty recognizing the extent to which most people alive NOW have lived their entire lives in a mediated/represented world they experience as real. French social theorist Baudrillard (1988) writes, ” Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is a Disneyland.”
Baudrillard, J. (1988). Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford University Press. pp 171-72.
