Second Life is Still A Thing?

So way back in the late 2000s, I earned a masters degree in English with an emphasis on technical writing.

In the intervening years, that degree has led me to a side job of teaching online English courses and thus has helped me earn back the money invested in the education and then some. (Not that I should justify education by increase earning power or return on investment, but here we are.)

Part of that degree included a semester spent in Second Life, for some reason. It was an elective class that fulfilled a degree requirement, so I took it. I remember we had the goal of making an in-world business, so you could call me an early metapreneur. Or not, because the business we put together went nowhere, but I got an A in the class and earned my degree, so it served its purpose.

Recently, I thought I'd look to see if Second Life was still a thing.

Regrettably, but not surprisingly, it really isn't. Or is too confusing of a thing for my addled Gen X brain to decide is worth pursuing further.

I think the interface confused me. I recovered my username and password (luckily I used an email address I still have access to when I registered the first time, rather than my student account which is now defunct).

But upon entering, I discovered I had to create a new username and password to enter the individual areas of Second Life. After a bit of confusion and Googling, I did so, and decided, after having to reinstall the software and drift into the new area which seemed to be completely unpopulated, that it just wasn't worth the bother.

There are probably places I can go online to find out where the "activity" is on Second Life, but I just can't be bothered.

Is Second Life Dying Out?

The folks at Valleywag/Gawker (whatever they call their shrinking blogosphere empire these days) have an interesting article on what they call the “deathwatch” for Second Life, the online virtual world that most people have read so much but remember so very little about because, frankly, it is as VW/Gawker says: Overhyped and kinda boring.

I spent a semester in Second Life as part of a class for the masters in technical writing degree I’m working on. I created and customized an avatar, made virtual clothing and spent a lot of time wandering the PG-rated ins and outs of Second Life’s world. My most vivid memories:

1) Getting stuck inside a Jetsonmobile. I could get in. I could not get out. I had to teleport out, rather than exit the more traditional way.

2) Chatting with other members of my class about an “in-world” project (it sounded so exciting and important at the time) we were working on. As I think back on the experience now, Second Life served as little more than an IM system, albeit one that had sorta-cool places one could wander while one chatted, if the others in the group could keep up with your comically fast Second Life strut.

3) Watching my avatar sit in the lotus position while lilty sitar music playe din the background. I checked in on good ol' Jacob Rabinowicz a few times whiel I was in the real world, doing other stuff. Every time I came back, he was still sitting there in that lotus position, looking totally blissed out. He still looked that wasy after I watched the entirety of Apollo 13. Good for him.

Sorta cool. I think that’s the telling part of my Second Life experience. I sort of enjoyed wandering through NASA’s “island” in Second Life. But wandering through their island felt as satisfying as driving by the National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall without bothering to go inside.

VW/Gawker mentions that Reuters’ presence in Second Life is now gone. That does not surprise me. I spent some time wandering around Reuters’ rather impressive pavilion there. Met nary a soul, nor find anything interesting to do there except wonder if I could find a can of virtual spray paint so I could write “Frodo Lives!” on one of their rather sterile walls. That, at least, would have given subsequent visitors to Reuters something to look at.

The rub is this, and it goes down to basic tenets of good web design. If the information/experience that the searcher is looking for is there on your site, you are providing a valuable service. The more I wandered Second Life, the more I realized that what I want is not there. There’s a lot of “there” there, but the feeling I got from wandering this virtual world is that damned few people have figured out the “why.” Most of the people I met were like me – wandering souls with little to do in Second Life than wander and gawk and, I believe, wonder why they were there in the first place.

Part of our objective in taking a class that centered on Second Life was to determine how such virtual worlds could be used in the workplace. Virtual reality does have its place in the unvierse. in fact, the higher-ups where I work (a nuclear waste dump) had toyed for years with using an iteration of virtual reality to allow heavy equipment operators control their machines remotely, rather than having to suit up and enter that radioactive world. But that idea came to naught. And aside from obvious educational and entertainment applications, even after a semester of poking and prodding at Second Life failed to convince me that such worlds have application in the workplace, or at least the workplaces I'm familiar with.

Same goes for the stranger workplaces I'm involved in. A side project has me collaborating on a web project with team members scattered across the United States and India. This might seem an obvious application for econd Life -- but there are far simpler tools out there (IM, e-mail, video conferencing, text-based virtual offices, et cetera and ad nauseum) that are easier to use than Second Life. Second Life certainly pushes the envelope on bringing international teams together, but one has to wonder why that envelope has to be pushed when stuff that's already in the mailbox works just as well, and is much less time-consuming to begin with.

After said semester ended, I pretended to enjoy spending my after the kids are in bed hours in Second Life. But the sad tale is I soon found that the time I had to dedicate to Second Life was better spent in first life, accomplishing tasks that held my interest as well as the virtual world did: doing dishes, collecting firewood, reading books. And I didn’t need a custom-made avatar to accomplish those tasks. I have a custom-made body for that.

That’s not to say Second Life doesn’t have something for somebody. Many have lamented the absence of gambling in-world. Gambling was a Second Life staple until Linden Labs banned it, under pressure from the Feds. Then again, there is (or so I’ve heard; I never saw evidence of it) opportunity for rather randy experiences in Second Life that I won’t describe on this blog. So. Gambling and pr0n. Whee.

Second Life advocates now are touting the virtual world’s educational opportunities, outside of the two realms just mentioned. That day may come. In the meantime, there are other online educational services that function just as well – or better – than Second Life. I’m nearly done with my masters degree, a feat I’ve accomplished entirely online. I may not even attend graduation in December because the trip, in the physical universe, seems superfluous to the point of the entire exercise, which is getting the degree.

My last contact with Second Life? It came in a rather snarkily-worded e-mail from New Citizens, Inc., which informed me I’d been ejected from the group. Probably due to lassitude on my part, as I had not been online in Second Life for more than six months. And I don’t miss it a bit.

Back by Unpopular Demand . . . My SL Paper

Tipping the Balance:

Despite the hype, virtual worlds offer chances for professional communicators – if we're ready to take them

Brian Davidson (Second Life avatar, Jacob Rabinowicz)

We’ve heard it all before.

Back in 1961, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Newton N. Minow gave his famous “vast wasteland” speech in regards to the content of television:

“When television is good, nothing –not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you –and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.”

Today, as professional communicators explore virtual worlds – notably, Second Life – as potential 21^st-century venues for professional collaboration, training, simulation and other work activities, much the same is being said about these worlds as Minow said about television – with the added wrinkle that, barring a power failure, network breakdown or server blow-up, these virtual worlds never sign off.

If we see these potentials in Second Life and other virtual worlds, it’s up to us to work through these worlds’ weaknesses to demonstrate that potential to those who hold the purse strings. We have to seize upon our professional interest in these worlds to tip the balance from vast wasteland to public interest.

Second Life and other virtual worlds do indeed have their weaknesses:

They gobble hardware	Calling for graphics cards, computer memory and Internet bandwidth that companies may balk at providing. According to Reuters, while Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, brag that only between 2 and 4 percent of the virtual world's regions deliver less than 35 frames per second as of December 2007, the average user has seen performance decline from 13.5 fps in April 2007 to 12.3 fps in December 2007. Linden Labs defines anything below 20 fps to be “very slow and laggy.” The slow frame speeds are due to end-user hardware not being up to Second Life's demands.
They offer temptation	Companies are already concerned about lost production time to the Internet in general; introducing virtual worlds to the world of work might seem an open invitation to goofing off. In the past three years, surveys conducted by Salary.com and AOL of an average of 2,500 bosses and employees per year show at least 43 percent of respondents admit to using the Internet for personal use while at work, marking the Internet as their primary time-waster. They also admit to wasting nearly two hours a day at work doing non-work tasks.
They’re the Wild West	The United States government ordered casinos operating in Second Life to shut down in July 2007, as on line gambling is illegal. Time magazine also says German officials are investigating allegations that traffickers in child pornography are using Second Life to exchange explicit material.
They’re unpredictable	In 2007, the so-called Second Life Liberation Army set off virtual nuclear devices near Second Life corporate stores operated by American Apparel and Reebok and also virtually gunned down American Apparel shoppers in a separate incident. According to Time, American Apparel and Starwood Hotels pulled out of substantial investments in Second Life in 2007, citing “low traffic and raunchy behavior.”
They're sparsely populated	In 2007, Linden Labs reported 2.3 million registered members – a number which increased to 8.7 in 2008. The number of active users, however – those who use Second Life more than just once a week – has lagged. In 2003, the number of active users was estimated by Linden Labs and outside consultants at between 200,000 and 230,000; in 2008, it has climbed – but only to 600,000.

These worlds’ greatest weakness, however, when it comes to applying them in the workplace, may simply be that there are other ways to use the Internet to bring people together to collaborate that companies already have – e-mail, wikis, voice and video conferencing, the simple telephone.

But we would be well to heed what Minow said in 1961 about novelty and its power.

The television industry in 1961, Minow said, possessed “the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make your people aware of the world.”

Today, the Internet wields that power. Second Life and similar virtual worlds, though novelties now, are part of that disparate Internet world where the vast wasteland is battling with the public interest in the form of universities offering classes, businesses recruiting new hires, doctors working with patients in virtual rehabilitation and, somewhere I’m sure, professional communicators meeting, collaborating, working and celebrating when their work is done.

In a small way, I’ve participated in such an inroad. In pursuing a masters degree in technical writing from Utah State University, I took a course in the summer of 2008 with about a half dozen other students, in which we took a look at Second Life and how it could be used in our profession.

We started with two Second Life premises: One group would build virtual furniture and a virtual office we and others could use in Second Life for our meetings. The furniture and office were built in sandboxes – areas in Second Life set aside for building experimentation, free of charge. The other group, of which I was a member, would create in-world and real-world advertising for the furniture group, pulling together elements of Second Life as well as real life, including the use of real-life, formatted documents the furniture group could exchange and explore as they sought out ideas on what kinds of furniture to build next.

Ours was not a flawless exploration, nor did we find a virtual world free of flaws that inhibit professional use of virtual worlds. Second Life, for example, offers no easy way to exchange formatted documents, and even makes bringing computer slide shows and videos into the world a bit more difficult than it should be. As Second Life’s many critics have pointed out, there are simply easier ways to do these kinds of things – either through a group wiki or Web site, using the services of Web sites such as issuu.com to post and exchange documents or merely picking up the phone or sending an e-mail to collaborate. “It could just be me, but I don’t see the usefulness of [Second Life,]” writes John Sheesley, a section editor at Tech Republic, a popular news and discussion Web site for those in tech-related industries. “I’m not sure what you can do with such a thing that you couldn’t do with just a conference call or NetMeeting,” he continues. “Maybe someone who’s more used to or comfortable with virtual worlds would find it beneficial, but I sure don’t get it.” And more: “You can run seminars and symposiums in Second Life. But why going to a seminar or meeting as an avatar is a good idea is beyond me,” writes Simon van Wyk at hothouse.com.au, an Australian web marketing blog. “People have been running these types of meetings for years using a range of tools. Webcasting, Netmeeting, IRC - these are important and they have shaped the Internet and our usage and expectations. Second Life just makes this harder to get to.”

We found, however, that behind the novelty, there are advantages as well, and that “getting it,” as Sheesley identifies as imperative, takes more than just experimentation with virtual worlds. Additionally, critics often forget that technologies like webcasting and Netmeeting were new once, too.

In some ways, I found Second Life to be more liberating than other collaborative tools I've used – from Basecamp to iVisit. I am, for example, generally a shy, inhibited person. If I can avoid using the telephone, I’ll do so. Collaborating with me over the phone is a painful experience. But as our group met in Second Life to discuss our project, that wall vanished. I chatted easily with my group members. We accomplished much in a short amount of time because Second Life allowed us to meet together, exchange ideas and collaborate with a second class group. Our project involved creating a communication and advertising campaign for another class group, which was designing and building Second Life furniture. Our group worked around some Second Life limitations, specifically the inability to create information-rich documents in Second Life itself. We, like many other Second Life residents, used current document-sharing methods, such as e-mail and posting documents to common servers where the entire team could read and comment on them.

As we worked, however, we discovered the process of collaborating in Second Life to be more valuable than the end products (the furniture and advertising campaign). That we worked together in Second Life to plan our various project elements helped remove Second Life from the world of novelty into the world of utility. Second Life allowed us to create a social environment – a critical point in a successful collaborative work environment, according to Nardi and Whittaker who advise focusing on “not what people communicate about, but [on] how they create a social environment in which they can communicate at all.”

There are many ways we could have communicated as we worked on our various projects, ranging from e-mails to messages exchanged in our on line classroom. We naturally sought out, however, the continuity of face-to-face conversations in Second Life (focusing on shared content and culture as we went about our virtual work, as recommended by Watson-Manheim, Chudowba and Crowston in “Discontinuities and continuities: a new way to understand virtual work”).

In other words, we sought out the sociability we could build in Second Life. “Face to face communication supports touch, shared activities, eating and drinking together, as well as informal interactions and attention management,” Nardi and Whittaker write. “We argue that these activities are crucial for sustaining the social relationships that make distributed work possible.” We didn't necessarily eat and drink together while in Second Life, but that we could all socialize and work in a single environment even though we were widely dispersed by geography and also experience is a wonderful testament to working in a virtual world. In our own brief excursion into Second Life, for example, we found:

• A group of people determined to use Second Life to collaborate and work in a professional manner can do so, without interruption from any in-world distraction.

• The Second Life learning curve, feared by many, does not necessarily apply. Even in our small class of about a half dozen, we had enough people who could learn how to build Second Life objects, recognize how Second Life could interact with other Web applications and how Second Life could function as a professional space at minimal or no cost to accomplish our work goals.

• We created an example of professional collaboration in Second Life we could show our real-life employers.
  

What may be most important about virtual worlds like Second Life is that they add to the variety of Internet-based tools we have at our disposal to make collaboration and the exchange of ideas simpler and more satisfying. Rather than fretting about composing an e-mail or memo, we simply met in Second Life and talked to each other, as we might over the telephone or beside the water cooler, taking advantage of the natural flow of conversation to guide us as we worked and to inspire us to take new directions we might not have considered had we been working though e-mail or other means, where communication is not done in real-time.

Continued development of virtual worlds may further contribute to those real-time exchanges. Studies such as the Metaverse Roadmap, conducted by the Acceleration Studies Foundation, could fuel further technological synergies, as long as the necessary hardware lies within the grasp of the average knowledge worker.

The foundation surveyed information technology experts and frequent Internet users to find out what they believe about the future of such technologies. The respondents predict that the “Metaverse,” a term taken from Neal Stephenson’s 1993 novel Snow Crash, which describes a virtual world in which people interact, learn and socialize as much as they do in the real world, will primarily be used for social interaction and communication, but that growing numbers of people will use such environments to earn money, to learn and even to exercise, as the growing phenomenon of the Nintendo Wii has already demonstrated. The study also explores how 3D technologies (such as Google Earth), virtual worlds (such as Second Life) and other computer applications ranging from animation to artificial life could shape the Internet in the future.

The roadmap also sees future utility in merging virtual worlds with the real world – or at least the real world in the form of Google maps and similar services. The future could see virtual avatars wandering Google Maps’ real streets, holding virtual meetings with real people in real representations of real places. “In time, many of the Internet activities we now associate with the 2D Web will migrate to the 3D space of the Metaverse,” the roadmap’s authors write. “This does not mean all or even most of our web pages will become 3D, or even that we’ll typically read web content in 3D spaces. It means that as new tools develop, we’ll be able to intelligently mesh 2D and 3D to gain the unique advantages of each, in the appropriate context. Like the Web, the Metaverse wouldn’t be the entirety of the Internet – but like the Web, it would be seen by many as the most important part.”

Today, that potential lies mostly untapped in virtual worlds, just as 25 years ago, the novelty lay in those new-fangled inventions, e-mail and the World Wide Web. They may appear weird and appealing only to a few – but that’s the same way many felt when CBS news began broadcasting Internet URLs along with their news stories. As time goes on, perceptions – and usefulness – change. Second Life has the potential to be either a western or a symphony – or a happy mixture of both, where those who want to be informed can gather just as easily as those who want to be entertained – and gather in ways that keep the professional decorum some seek.

The best way to do that may simply be to explore Second Life and use it professionally. Why wait, all explorers may say, when you can be the vanguard? Most of my fellow classmates, going into this virtual world, had doubts to its use. Eight weeks after entering Second Life, some of those doubts still exist. We’re skeptical that Second Life can be anything more than, as many critics on the Web have described it, a 3D chat room. But it seems premature to write Second Life off completely. Here are a few suggestions of what we can do as professionals to demonstrate to ourselves and others that Second Life and other, similar virtual worlds, have some potential:

Find other like-minded souls, both in real and virtual world	I, for example, have joined a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based group of professionals – ranging from teachers to writers to administrators – who are exploring how they and their companies can use Second Life as a communication and collaboration tool. Aside from its Second Life presence, the group maintains a website where members may exchange messages and ideas on how they're using Second Life in their professional environments.
Get deeply into the virtual world	This implies not necessarily settling in with virtual property, but rather finding people with similar professional interests in Second Life, starting a Second life group meant to attract like-minded individuals, and taking opportunities to participate in professional uses of Second Life, even if those uses at the time don't fit in with your particular career or company. I have spent time talking with people at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Second Life Island, and have participated in a few events there, focusing on recent successes in NASA's remote explorations of Mars. Though the gatherings aren't particularly oriented towards professional communicators, they provide ample example of how the site can be used professionally.
Get off the hype and onto the evidence	Find individuals within your own company who are interested in exploring Second Life's potential. Examine that potential together – outside regular working hours – and document it through the videos, photos and chat transcripts Second Life allows you to produce, so when you go to your employer formally to show how Second Life could be used in your workplace, you have the evidence to back up your claims.

Virtual worlds may be a novelty at the moment – but so was television. So was the Internet. As professional communicators, we could play a hand in easing Second Life and other virtual worlds past that novelty and turning it into “an instrument of overwhelming impact,” echoing Minow’s words about the potential of television, so many years ago.

A Few Professional Spaces

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

First, stroll through JPL and NASA's virtual space flight museum, which heavily features models and information on remote explorers and satellites currently plying the mysteries of the planet Mars. More importantly, attend one of JPL's regularly-scheduled meeting, which attract amateur space enthusiasts and professionals willing to discuss the ins and outs of the American space program.

SLURL (Second Life Uniform Resource Locator) : http://slurl.com/secondlife/Explorer%20Island/183/151/23.

Book Island Publishing Village

Second Life has a surprisingly strong population of publishers looking to find the next great novel, and many of them have gathered in this village, setting up storefronts where they sell books and offer contacts to budding writers.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Book%20Island/222/213/36

IBM Virtual Business Center

IBM has perhaps one of the largest corporate presences in Second Life, and is using the space for on line meetings and as a demonstration of how to integrate thousands of existing company Web sites into a 3D environment.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/IBM%20Business%20Center////

Professionalism and Second Life

Tipping the Balance:

If professional communicators see potential in virtual worlds like Second Life, it’s up to us to demonstrate that potential and help pull these worlds back from the Internet’s vast wasteland

Targeted for Intercom magazine

Brian Davidson
(Second Life avatar, Jacob Rabinowicz)

We’ve heard it all before.

Back in 1961, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Newton N. Minow gave his famous “vast wasteland” speech in regards to the content of television:

“When television is good, nothing –not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you –and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.”

Today, as professional communicators explore virtual worlds – notably, Second Life – as potential 21st-century venues for professional collaboration, training, simulation and other work activities, much the same is being said about these worlds as Minow said about television – with the added wrinkle that, barring a power failure, network breakdown or server blow-up, these virtual worlds never sign off.

If we see these potentials in Second Life and other virtual worlds, it’s up to us to work through these worlds’ weaknesses – both real and perceived – to demonstrate that potential to those who hold the purse strings. We have to seize upon our professional interest in these worlds to tip the balance from vast wasteland to public interest.

Second Life and other virtual worlds do indeed have their weaknesses:

• They gobble hardware – calling for graphics cards, computer memory and Internet bandwidth that companies may balk at providing.
• They offer temptation – companies are already concerned about lost production time to the Internet in general; introducing virtual worlds to the world of work might seem an open invitation to goofing off.
• They’re obscure – Mention Second Life, The Sims Online, or Active Worlds, and you get a blank look from many over 30.
• They’re unprofessional – Those who have heard of these worlds are likely familiar with pop culture mentions on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, or new stories about Second Life gatherings being interrupted by penis storms. Sexually-oriented businesses, ranging from soft-core pornography to sites where avatars – computer representations of Second Life users – may engage in simulated sex are among the world’s most popular sites, seemingly stimulating Second Life’s growth as pornography stimulated the growth of AOL’s early dial-up Internet services and the triumph of the VHS videocassette format over Betamax.
• They’re unpredictable and somewhat anti-corporate. (Example: the so-called Second Life Liberation Army set off virtual “nuclear devices” near Second Life corporate stores operated by American Apparel and Reebok in an attempt to convince Linden Labs, the San Francisco-area company that created Second Life, to allow Second Life citizens the right to vote on in-world activities.)
• They’re misperceived – They’re games, aren’t they? Or, at best, a novelty. Second Life may give you a chance to walk around a virtual Paris circa 1900, offer a virtual NASA space flight museum and the chance to stroll a virtual Dublin – one of Second Life’s most popular spots – where you can virtually dance and virtually enjoy drinks in a virtual Irish pub. It all sounds like Jerry Seinfeld’s TV show: A place in between places, a place about nothing at all.

These worlds’ greatest weakness, when it comes to applying them in the workplace, may, however, simply be that there are other ways to use the Internet to bring people together to collaborate that companies already have – e-mail, wikis, voice and video conferencing, the simple telephone.

But we would be well to heed what Minow said in 1961 about novelty and its power.

The television industry in 1961, Minow said, possessed “the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make your people aware of the world.”

Today, the Internet wields that power. Second Life and similar virtual worlds, though novelties now, are part of that disparate Internet world where the vast wasteland – in the form of twaddling, mundane conversation, senseless commercialization and mass attacks by giant virtual penises – is battling with the public interest – in the form of universities offering classes, businesses recruiting new hires, doctors working with patients in virtual rehabilitation and, somewhere I’m sure, professional communicators meeting, collaborating, working and celebrating when their work is done.

In a small way, I’ve participated in such an inroad. In pursuing a masters degree in technical writing from Utah State University, I took a course in the summer of 2008 with about a half dozen other students, in which we took a look at Second Life and how it could be used in our profession.

We started with two Second Life premises: One group would build virtual furniture and a virtual office we and others could use in Second Life for our meetings. The furniture and office were built in sandboxes – areas in Second Life set aside for building experimentation, free of charge. The other group, of which I was a member, would create in-world and real-world advertising for the furniture group, pulling together elements of Second Life as well as real life, including the use of real-life, formatted documents the furniture group could exchange and explore as they sought out ideas on what kinds of furniture to build next.

Ours was not a flawless exploration, nor did we find a virtual world free of flaws that inhibit professional use of virtual worlds. Second Life, for example, offers no easy way to exchange formatted documents, and even makes bringing computer slide shows and videos into the world a bit more difficult than it should be. As Second Life’s many critics have pointed out, there are simply easier ways to do these kinds of things – either through a group wiki or Web site, using the services of Web sites such as issuu.com to post and exchange documents or merely picking up the phone or sending an e-mail to collaborate.

We found, however, that behind the novelty, there are advantages as well. I am, for example, generally a shy, inhibited person. If I can avoid using the telephone, I’ll do so. Collaborating with me over the phone is a painful experience. But as our group met in Second Life to discuss our project (discussed in full here:)

that wall vanished. I chatted easily with my group members. We accomplished much in a short amount of time because Second Life allowed us to meet together, exchange ideas and collaborate with a second class group.

We also discovered the process – collaborating in Second Life – more valuable than the end products (the furniture and advertising campaign). That we worked together in Second Life to plan our various project elements helped remove Second Life from the world of novelty into the world of utility.

Thus enters the public interest of Second Life and other virtual worlds – much as it entered the world of television when Minow gave his famous speech. “Ours has been called the jet age, the atomic age, the space age. It is also, I submit, the
television age,” Minow wrote. “And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today's world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind's benefit, so will history decide whether today's broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or to debase them.”

The same will be said of the Internet, and of virtual worlds like Second Life.

Second Life and other virtual worlds will join the realm of public interest when those who participate there find ways to make it so. In our own brief excursion, we found:

• A group of people determined to use Second Life to collaborate and work in a professional manner can do so, without interruption from any in-world distraction, be it an unruly avatar or animated genitalia.
• The Second Life learning curve, feared by many, does not necessarily apply. Even in our small class of about a half dozen, we had enough people who could learn how to build Second Life objects, recognize how Second Life could interact with other Web applications and how Second Life could function as a professional space at minimal or no cost to accomplish our work goals.
• We created an example of professional collaboration in Second Life we could show our real-life employers.

What may be most important about virtual worlds like Second Life is that they add to the variety of Internet-based tools we have at our disposal to make collaboration and the exchange of ideas simpler and more satisfying.

The Metaverse Roadmap, a study conducted by the Acceleration Studies Foundation, has the aim of predicting how 3D technologies (such as Google Earth), virtual worlds (such as Second Life) and other computer applications ranging from animation to artificial life will shape the Internet in the future.

The foundation surveyed information technology experts and frequent Internet users to find out what they believe about the future of such technologies. The respondents predict that the “Metaverse,” a term taken from Neal Stephenson’s 1993 novel Snow Crash, which describes a virtual world in which people interact, learn and socialize as much as they do in the real world, will primarily be used for social interaction and communication, but that growing numbers of people will use such environments to earn money, to learn and even to exercise, as the growing phenomenon of the Nintendo Wii has already demonstrated.

The roadmap also sees future utility in merging virtual worlds with the real world – or at least the real world in the form of Google maps and similar services. The future could see virtual avatars wandering Google Maps’ real streets, holding virtual meetings with real people in real representations of real places. “In time, many of the Internet activities we now associate with the 2D Web will migrate to the 3D space of the Metaverse,” the roadmap’s authors write. “This does not mean all or even most of our web pages will become 3D, or even that we’ll typically read web content in 3D spaces. It means that as new tools develop, we’ll be able to intelligently mesh 2D and 3D to gain the unique advantages of each, in the appropriate context. Like the Web, the Metaverse wouldn’t be the entirety of the Internet – but like the Web, it would be seen by many as the most important part.”

Minow saw that potential, mostly untapped, in television. “I believe that the public interest is made up of many interests,” Minow wrote and said back in 1961. “You will get no argument from me if you say that, given a choice between a western and a symphony, more people will watch the western. I like westerns too, but a steady diet for the whole country is obviously not in the public interest. We all know that people would more often prefer to be entertained than stimulated or informed. But your obligations are not satisfied if you look only to popularity as a test of what to broadcast. You are not only in show business; you are free to communicate ideas as well as relaxation.”

Today, that potential lies mostly untapped in virtual worlds. They may appear weird and appealing only to a few – but that’s the same way many felt when CBS news began broadcasting Internet URLs along with their news stories. As time goes on, perceptions – and usefulness – change. Second Life has the potential to be either a western or a symphony – or a happy mixture of both, where those who want to be informed can gather just as easily as those who want to be entertained – and gather in ways that keep the professional decorum some seek.

The best way to do that may simply be to explore Second Life and use it professionally. Why wait, all explorers may say, when you can be the vanguard? Most of my fellow classmates, going into this virtual world, had doubts to its use. Eight weeks after entering Second Life, some of those doubts still exist. We’re skeptical that Second Life can be anything more than, as many critics on the Web have described it, a 3D chat room. But it seems premature to write Second Life off completely. While we still have doubts, we also experienced glimmers of inspiration and vision – one class member met a woman who helped a group set up a Second Life area used to rehabilitate people who had suffered strokes. Others attended Second Life Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Myself, I encountered many people sincere in the belief that valuable work can be done in Second Life, from discussions on NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander to poets who joined together to write poems for hire.

Virtual worlds may be a novelty at the moment – but so was television. So was the Internet. As professional communicators, we could play a hand in easing Second Life past that novelty and turning it into “an instrument of overwhelming impact,” echoing Minow’s words about the potential of television.

A Virtual Vast Wasteland

The next week and a half will wind up the class I'm taking that involves Second Life. The last project: A paper that explores how Second Life could address (or, I suppose, compound) a technical communication problem/situation I've encountered in real life. At this point, I'm not sure where my paper will go (a draft is due Thursday, help). But I keep thinking back to this Dutch Kit-Kat commercial, and former FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow's "vast wasteland" speech concerning television in 1961:

When television is good, nothing -- not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers -- nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you -- and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

The same, I'm afraid, can be said for Second Life, except that the programming is more varied -- extremely good or extremely poor -- and it never shuts off. So if I don't know the direction the paper will go, at least I know the tone. Which, in retrospect, won't be as grim as this sounds. When Mr. Minow gave his speech, people (likely with the help of journalists) latched on to the "vast wasteland" sound bite, rather than focusing on the "public interest" he hoped to convey in his speech. He was vilified in the industry for making fun of the quality of television -- Sherwood Schwartz, producer of Gilligan's Island, named the S.S. Minnow after Minow as a comment on his perceived elitist trash talking. But Minow really did want people to remember the public interst portion of his speech more than anything else:

The television industry then, Minow said, “possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make your people aware of the world.”

He wanted television to take that power and use a portion of it to claim the high ground. That, in some ways, has happened. In many ways, it has not.

The same can be said now of the Internet, which wields the same kind of power television once weilded, as Minow outlines. On the Net, we see both the highbrow and the lowbrow. I think he'd agree today that the public interest versus the vast wasteland of the Internet is being ignored, much as it was in television's era.

Second Life, Real Life

The following is a paper I've written for one of my technical communication classes, on how a business (in this case, a Second Life furniture-making business) can use the real world (or as real as the Internet gets) in complement with their Second Life presence to organize documentation and ideas internally while advertising externally.

I am such a genius

Wile E. Coyote

Integrating Virtual Environments in the Workplace

NOTE: Another essay from a class I'm currently taking.

About a week ago, Da7id and I had a conversation while farting around Second Life – he asked the question (I’m paraphrasing here): Do you see any possibilities for Second Life in your professional world? I believe I answered maybe – Second Life has inherent strengths, some of which it shares in common with the MUDs and MOOs Churchill and Bly speak of in their article “Virtual Environments at Work: ongoing use of MUDs in the Workplace.” But Second Life, like the worlds this article describes, has inherent weaknesses that will prevent workplace adoption of SL as a professional tool, especially when compared with professional tools such as phones and e-mail which already have management blessings.

All of this may be a generational thing – Da7id and I agreed that in another generation or two, SL and other, more advanced virtual environments, may indeed be the norm.

I believe successful integration of technology hinges on management and participant acceptance of the technology and the nature of the workplace.

It’s interesting to note that the participants in the Argonne MUD Churchill and Bly describe are desk jockeys, or appeared to be so – many of them mentioned using the MUD to avoid having to visit others’ cubicles, and that they maintained an open MUD window on their computers. Bly and Churchill insist that for the MUD strategy to work, “it is clear that there needs to be a critical mass of users (101).” This arrangement works, however, only if the critical mass of workers are bound to desks, or do much of their work at their desks, whether at home or in the workplace. But if the critical mass leaves out a category of worker that is essential to the discussion, the MUD (and Second Life) has its professional limitations.

Where I work, the people who work in Operations aren’t bound to their desks, as their work is in the field, away from their computers. The accepted management technology plan includes emphasis on e-mails and phones. Top-tier operational personnel are assigned BlackBerrys, so they can get their e-mail on the go. Our document revision and approval process involves a computer program that is analogous to a MUD room, though it is limited to asynchronous communication. To enter this “room,” users have to be at their computers. Often when we need concurrence on a document, we have to literally drag our operators to their computers, away from the work they’re doing. They barely have the time to make e-mail work; they simply don’t put in enough desk time to make a MUD work. This is true for many who work here – ranging from radiological engineers to industrial hygienists. To find them in their office at a computer is a rarity. These people lie in the critical path of the work we do – so for the MUD to work, management would have to realize that these operators need more computer time than they’re allotted. As interviewee Rob notes in Churchill and Bly’s article, the computer is not an official Operational tool – the phone is.

Churchill and Bly write further: “Organizational endorsement is a clear factor in the uptake of any technology. Resistance was clear in a number of our interviewees who either were resistant themselves or feared the resistance of those they considered important (104).” Selling a MUD or Second Life would be a challenge, especially considering the limitations of the technology. Those who use the MUD at Argonne obviously sold it as an important tool in their collaborations. Such an effort would equally be needed to sell Second Life. Such salesmanship is possible -- even considering the limitations described later.

I sincerely believe there are professional potentials in Second Life, and other similar environments. But getting the necessary buy-in (and approved computer time) for all participants will be a limiting factor. Churchill and Bly recognize this as a serious problem. It may be up to individual groups to show the utility of using MUDs, SL, in collaborative, creative ways that get the results management wants – management seems flexible in letting us get our work done in any way we see fit, as long as it meets the regulatory requirements and is done in a timely fashion.

Other restrictions include: Hardware requirements, document limitations, and the potential for goofing off and the mere appearance of unprofessionalism.

Hardware – I think it’s a safe bet only a small percentage – if any – of the computers where I work meet the minimum hardware requirements SL asks for. Our computers are an average four years old and were purchased as “glorified word processors,” with limited processing speed and graphics capabilities.

Document limitations -- The MUDs Churchill and Bly write about share a common shortfall with Second Life – the inability to share documents effectively. “We would probably – at least I would probably visit more if I could, for example, send an equation to, say, Marv, and say, “Marv, what do you think of this equation?” writes Jerry, an infrequent MUD user (105). “Right now, if you want to do that, you either have to come up with some method to translate that . . .” Rather than face the extra time involved in making such conversions, and in the interest of preserving document formatting, outside graphics and other issues, SL users who rely on exchanging documents may simply revert to e-mail, a much simpler method of sharing documents. An obvious work-around is to use SL in conjunction with a word processor and e-mail program – but that would easily convince those reluctant to use the collaborative possibilities in SL that SL does not fit the need – why use an elaborate 3-D environment when the word processors and e-mail we have “works better”?

SL could take a great leap forward Limits on the kind of rich textual information that can be exchanged – it’s great for talking, poorer for documents. SL gives option to go to web pages or play movies, power points, for a fee (albeit nominal in most cases) – should also give option to open up common document formats (RTF, PDF, et cetera) and allow those to be uploaded to avatar inventories in order to make the note card tool much more professional. I have searched for ways to do this, but to no avail. Cut-and-paste methodology may work with the SL note cards, but again, the note cards are not set up as word processors, but simply a method of sharing simple texts.

Goofing off/professionalism -- Churchill and Bly write, “A number of people complained about the rich descriptions and the mapping convention utilized in this particular MUD. This was seen to be frivolous, not in keeping with the organization’s image and a distraction when unnecessary test was being sent to the screen (105).” Again, the same can be said of SL. Even in the professional environments we encounter there, there is an element of frivolity that would be distracting to some, adding fuel to their desire to cut SL from the tools they use for work.

Second Life, Part II

NOTE: The following is from a Second Life travelogue I wrote for one of the masters-level classes I'm taking this semester. More from it to follow.

Book Island Publishing Village

Woo-hoo! So, you’ve written a book and want to get it published? Visit Book Island and find everything you’d want, from freebie bags giving your avatars free t-shirts, books and pirate gear (and what writer could possibly pass up free pirate gear?) to publishers form the vanity press to art and technology houses. And Scandanavian printing houses, in case you’ve written something that appeals specifically to Finns or Danes. Again, the networking angle is in high play here. Chat with fellow budding writers, find out how you might could get that dumb book you’ve been working on since high school published and in general make a high-falutin’ snobby fool of yourself. What could be more fun than that?

How about talking with a potential publisher, or at least the hired flunky of a potential publisher? E-mails and letters to the publishing houses won’t get you as close as Second Life, though, as you’ve guesses, there’s really no assurance you’re talking with a power-broker or the Intern they hired to run their SL site. But it’s worth a try, eh?

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Book%20Island/222/213/36

Written Word

So, you’re a writer. Writers write, don’t they? Yes. But they apparently also visit Second Life, where, at The Written Word, they can exchange ideas, texts, criticisms, snotty Oscar Wilde-is witticisms and then listen in as SL denizens interview a published author. Hey, that could be one of us pretty soon, eh?

Again, the networking possibilities here are staggering. The art of writing requires constant feedback, and here it is in the offing, if you’re brave enough and can figure out how to talk in Second Life, rather than relying on text – though they do say they will critique text if you’re shy or your voice sounds like Snow White on Helium. But they want you to speak. So on the Waterstage, they offer the most succinct tutorial on activating voice I’ve seen in weeks of trolling through Second Life – so they certainly do want to hear from you.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cookie/57/121/24

Second Life, Part I

NOTE: For one of the classes I'm taking this semester, we've become heavily involved in Second Life. The next few posts will be part of my introduction to that world, and contain some of the assignments from the class. Today, avatar customization. Tomorrow and into the future, a Second Life travelogue.

Meet Jacob Rabinowicz (aka Brian Davidson) -- Happily sporting a Linux penguin shirt and some pretty hefty sideburns. And this is the boy next door? Well, considering I grew up in Mormon Idaho, I guess ol’ Jacob here isn’t all that bad. But not necessarily me. So we start with the customization. Here's what I look like to start with:


Easiest thing to do: Complexion. I’m not a white as this guy. Oh, I’m white as they come, but given that I’m half Dutch, I’ve got a bit more ruddiness in my complexion than this guy. And I’m stockier. Fatter. My ears and nose are much bigger. So I play around with the facial and skin modifications, and get this:


Whoah! Mister Clean, lookin’ good, my man. Nose is great. I’m known far and wide for my sizeable honker. And that chin. Those wide lips. The slight smirk. Looking more like me the whole time. But no glasses in Second Life, at least none for free. I’ll just tell everyone I had Lasik. The ears, however, are too tiny. Gotta fix those. But gotta do something about the hair first.

I had a lot of trouble with the hair. And I mean a LOT of trouble. First to go, of course, were the sideburns. I just don’t sideburn. In fact, if I had the ability, I’d travel in time and take a razor to good ol’ Admiral Burnside and that would be the end of it. Well, probably not; they’d just have a different name.

The hair tools in Second Life are not at all intuitive. I didn’t want the big bangs Jacob came with. But when I tried to reduce their size, I ended up with a rather embarrassing bald spot on top, what Scott Adams calls the Pink Yarmulke look. Not good at all. So, I thought, I’ll drop all the hair sliders to zero (hence the Mr. Clean look captured here) and start from scratch. No good. No good at all. I managed to get rid of the sideburns, but kept on making myself look like a radiation victim or Ed Grimley. After a half hour of trying, I thought I had a pretty good hair style. But when I spun the camera around to look at myself, I realized I didn’ t have a hairstyle -- I had a hairdo. A serious do. A serious, bouffant, wife of an Apollo 13 astronaut hairdo. I looked like a chubby Doris Day in a penguin shirt. It was so repugnant and disturbing, I didn’t even take a picture. I couldn’t wander Second Life looking like an idiot. So I hit that trusty ol’ revert key and got back Jacob’s original hair, which I tinted to look a bit more like mine.

This is what I ended up with:


Not startlingly different from the original Jacob -- but this avatar looks more like me, though my pecs aren’t this magnificent, nor my shirts this tight. After an hour of experimenting with clothing, I can tell it’s not something you can pick up in just an hour of experimentation. I did ditch the shirt, though, for another freebie in my inventory. And, befitting my new, more medieval look, I opted to visit the castellated Administration Building at the University of Idaho, my alma mater. I think I look rather dashing, like one of those idiot young knights in those movies, the one who is too damn spunky for his own good, gets knocked off his horse a lot and gets a nickname along the lines of Wormy, but then, at the end, proves that his skills are at least as good as the schmoes who have been farting around in Knightland for twenty years or so. I did toy with the idea of a beard (I don‘t have one in real life, don‘t really like to wear them because they‘re too itchy. But the iterations I tried made me look too much like a blond Hitler or an undernourished Hulk Hogan. But here I sit:


Oh, I have ideas for more customized looks -- including a t-shirt I may try to build when I get a little more time. (I’m out of town this weekend, so that’s why the assignments are coming in a bit earlier this week.) I’d also like to create a Peter Lorre avatar, with the buggy eyes, the greasy slicked-back hair, but, again, that’ll have to wait until I’ve got more time on my hands.

Overall, I think the hour I invested in avatar customization was time well spent. I don’t look startlingly different than I did on the outset, but you can look at me and know now that my avatar isn’t just one of those off-the-shelf models. I feel better about that.

Does my avatar appear technical? No. I’m not sure that, in real life, I appear especially technical myself. I would have added glasses to my avatar had glasses been immediately available, and that in of itself might have added to an aura of technicalness -- but only in a stereotypical way, discounting the fact that many who require glasses get Lasik surgery and thus remove the necessity -- and stereo typicality -- of glasses. Leaving the Linux penguin shirt on might have added to a technical aura, but the shirt also adds to the aura of a newbie, as it’s a standard-issue article of clothing. I opted for the chain mail shirt (also a standard-issue bit of clothing -- because it appeared to fit the ruddy appearance of my avatar better than the pale penguin shirt. So to say my avatar is technical would be a lie.

I think, however, that my avatar appears much more approachable -- the primary reason being it does not appear to be a standard-issue avatar. The proof will be in the pudding, however. Given the variety of avatars wandering Second Life, approachability is in the eye of the beholder.

Socialability Leading to Professional Work in Second Life

NOTE: This post is a short essay I wrote for one of my tech comm classes this week.

Nardi and Whittaker seem to have hit on a key component of establishing and nurturing useful, professional communication in virtual worlds like Second Life when they write “The creation and maintenance of communication zones involves two key processes: establishing social bonds that enable people to feel emotionally connected to one another, and managing ‘attentional contracts’ in which people agree (sometimes fleetingly) to pay attention to one another’s communications (page 4) ,” in their essay The Place of Face-to-Face Communication in Distributed Work.

I have noted that in the distributed environments in which I’ve worked, good communication hinges only secondarily on the necessity to exchange information, including small talk. I’m more willing to communicate – and communicate more honestly and openly – with co-workers with whom I’ve had positive social interactions, whether they take place inside or outside of work. Because our relationships with others tend to be dynamic rather than static, I agree with Nardi and Whittaker when they write that despite the advent of technology that makes distributed work easier, face-to-face communication remains “the most information-rich medium,” because “it is the surest way to establish and nurture the human relationships underlying business relationships (page 2).”

What is required is for technical communicators to think outside the box when it comes to using technology to create virtual (not literal) face-to-face communications that bring with them the social bonds and attentional contracts Nardi and Whittaker attribute to physical face-to-face meetings.

We’ve all experienced examples of virtual relationships establishing social bonds. For example, for the past two years, my wife and I have corresponded with a man in England, whom my wife first encountered when she responded to e-mails he sent to an archery equipment company she worked for. They built an easy e-mail friendship on mutual interests – she’d lived in England, both were interested in archery – that has been maintained and expanded, long past the time my wife quit working for the company where the initial contact was established. We have never met face to face, but through years of interacting via e-mail and with the occasional phone call, we have built a relationship that is “grounded in social bonding and symbolic expressions of commitment (page 2).” The symbolic expressions have gone beyond e-mails and phone calls to the exchange of gifts by mail, photo exchanges and ongoing letters to our eight-year-old son in which our English friend pretends to be Roddy from Flushed Away. We also maintain attentional contracts by responding to e-mails and listening to the mp3s and podcasts we exchange via e-mail, keeping up constant written correspondence that shows we care to listen to what the other has to say or share.


The same bonds, obviously, ought to be achievable in virtual worlds like Second Life, once users realize, like Tex Avery cartoon characters, that to truly interact that fourth wall (the screen) has to be broken. (A simple example: Droopy Dog is known for forever turning to the audience and exclaiming, in his sad voice, "You know what? I'm happy.") To tell the truth, I’ve been handicapped a bit in building social interactions in Second Life, but I’ve come to realize it’s not the technology that’s getting in the way – it’s the personality. It takes me a long time to make and maintain friendships in the real world, so I should not expect anything different in the virtual world. I should not get hung up on the fact that I’m having a difficult time with the shorthand communication that seems to be the norm in Second Life. I should, as Nardi and Whittaker recommend, focus on “not what people communicate about, but how they create a social environment in which they can communicate at all (page 3).” I can see now that my attempts to communicate with random strangers on Second Life were as fruitless as such attempts in the real world not because of the virtual environment, but because the social bonding and attentional contracting had not taken place.

Obviously, participants in our class’ Second Life meetings have found a way to create that social environment. Just in reading the discussions about that meeting in Blackboard have shown that Second Life does indeed have potential to bring people together socially to form those bonds necessary for work. The meetings seem to resemble a dinner Nardi and Whittaker write about: “The dinner was not a forum for exchanging business information; rather clients used the occasion to share details of the minor miseries of their work lives. It facilitated social bonding after the initial, task-focused pre-production meeting. As far as the work itself was concerned, that was already accomplished (page 10).” Obviously, if we could build on our sociality in Second Life, transmuting our interactions into a professional classroom setting, where we exchange ideas and information could also easily be accomplished. Rather than posting assignments such as this on Blackboard, we could just as easily exchange them with the virtual cards we’ve all received, giving us instruction on various Second Life aspects, much as Hiro and Juanita exchange information via cards in Snow Crash. With a little more practice and a stint at looking how Second Life could help us organize exchanged information, I can see how we could easily move our interactions from Blackboard to Second Life – barring the inherent difficulties with synchronous participation versus the advantages Blackboard’s asynchronous communication offers.

Many of us were critical of the DIVE approach to communicating and organizing – but upon further reflection, it’s clear how such organization could work to bring together the advantages of synchronous and asynchronous communication in a work setting. The possibilities, I see, are only opening.

Second Life as the Metaverse: Similarities and Differences in the Rule of Law

NOTE: This post is from a class I'm taking right now on virtual workplaces.

Neal Stephenson paints the Metaverse in his novel "Snow Crash" as a chaotic, laissez-faire society where laws and computer code suit those who create them and democracy is available only to the powerful or the powerfully talented. It is a utopia – but only for a select few. It is a place of business and commerce – for a select few. It is a place to gather and commingle – but the best gathering and commingling is reserved for a select few. It is a fount of information – for those who want it and can afford it. So it is not a utopia. It is not democratic. The masses do not enter the Metaverse and immediately find themselves on equal footing with their peers. It is, in fact, only a virtual re-creation of the real world Hiro Protagonist and the other characters in “Snow Crash” live in; a society just as ugly, amoral and chaotic as its virtual counterpart.

Second Life, too, is no utopia. But because the society it reflects is more controlled, more serene than the society reflected in the Metaverse, it is a much more pleasant place to visit. Second Life has achieved that pleasantness through creating a basic set of behavioral rules that reflect the accepted norms of our Democratic (with the big D) and capitalistic society.

Second Life’s rules (viewable at secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php) reflect our societies thusly:

1) The “Big Six” rules, preaching against intolerance, harassment, assault, disclosure of personal information, indecency and disturbing the peace.
2) “Global Standards, Local Ratings,” which allow for “mature” niches in an otherwise “PG” world.
3) Global attacks, which forbid disruption of the Second Life universe or servers with malicious scripts or objects.
4) Caveat Emptor, or buyer beware. Commerce is allowed in Second Life, but purchases are made at risk, just as they are in real life.

These rules uphold common Democratic principles, in that localities should impose or lift rules on morals without or with minimal interference from a higher authority while accepting that some rules are universal.

Rules in the Metaverse are harder to pin down, partially because they’re not as clearly spelled out in Stephenson’s novel as Second Life’s rules are on their website, and mostly because the reflected society itself gets along with fewer rules. But there are rules to be followed.

In the Metaverse and the society it reflects, law and order are not provided – they are bought and paid for. In reality, Stephenson’s “burbclaves” pay private security firms or engage in their own elaborate security measures (such as the Rat Things in the Hong Kong franchulates and the Vigilante White Rule/Black Power memes of the segregationist burbclaves) to preserve order.

In the Metaverse equivalent of reality’s “burbclaves,” local rules are again the norm. The Black Sun, for example, employs daemon bouncers to roust out anyone who is “being disruptive . . . anyone who is pestering or taping a celebrity, and . . . anyone who seems contagious. That is, if your personal computer is infected with viruses, and attempts to spread them via the Black Sun, you had better keep one eye on the ceiling (p. 55).” The Metaverse, however, allows for clever hackers like Hiro Protagonist to find cracks and niches to exploit, with the understanding – or at least the tolerance – of those in power who allow his activity to continue. Da5id’s tolerance of Hiro’s “Bigboard” program, which occasionally plays havoc with The Black Sun’s programming, is one example of an individual being allowed to break community rules, such as they are.

Buyer beware is certainly a rule applied in the Metaverse – Hiro, certainly, is wary of any hypercards he’s offered, and criticized Da5id for accepting a hypercard from a “black and white,” or an avatar created inexpensively at a public access kiosk.

In Second Life, law and order is the rule of the day. There exist an equivalent of “burbclaves” in Second Life – areas ranked for mature behavior, and private residences of-limits to those not invited. These areas are offered to allow for truly Democratic use of Second Life and reflects our real societal desire for privacy and relative freedom from offense.

Second Life has a similar tolerance of Hiro’s “Bigboard” in allowing untested objects and scripts to be tried out in “sandbox” areas. Second Life’s rules, however, are unclear if tests in these areas that are disruptive will result in disciplinary action.

This is where two critical differences between the rule of law in Second Life versus the Metaverse comes in to play: In Second Life, discipline is left up to a board of humans that will judge the miscreant on the severity of the offense and levy appropriate punishment. In the Metaverse, discipline is left up to daemons – programs like The Black Sun’s Bouncers – and individuals who take the “law” into their own hands (Hiro’s dismembering of the upstart Nipponese barring his access to Sushi K in The Black Sun and his “disarming” of the Cliff avatar trying to infect him with the Snow Crash virus – both acts performed without consequence – stand out as examples).

Additionally, Second Life applies its discipline universally, both inside and out of its “burbclaves.” In the Metaverse, what rules are outlined seem to apply only in selected areas.

That greater rules of law are applied in Second Life reflects well on the orderly society in which we live our real lives. The skewed rule of law in the Metaverse is merely a reflection of the skewed reality.