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February 8th, 2011
10:42 am - Second Life / First Posted Jan 13, 2008, 3:54 am
Very, very strange and very often, not a very good strangeness ... social networking site minus the social networking. Some of the locations are pretty to look at, in a minimalistic kind of way, but after a while it all looks alike. Even worse, perhaps, for a site that claims to have millions of users, Second Life offers a virtual world that seems strangely deserted. One can find oneself visiting location after location trying to find somebody, anybody to interact with, only to find a few and watch them suddenly vanish, one after another after another. Weird. I know that a lot of netizens are shy, but just how timid does one have to be to run in fear from a cartoon?
  
Not that being snubbed is a given. Some places in SL seemed friendly, but even in them one is eventually posed with the question "what am I doing here". Picture playing a video game with the monsters removed. What's left? Something that is to chatrooms as the Web is to Usenet, perhaps - something that has been given structure where there was structurelessness and enriched that structure with graphic and sometimes audio content. |
That could be cool, if only there was a discussion to be had, but in SL, there almost never seems to be, especially if, out of curiosity, one wanders in with a visibly South Asian looking avatar whose name hints of partially Middle Eastern ancestry to see how the other users will react.
Maybe not entirely out of curiosity - the Second Life system sharply limits the user's choice of username. Just like in real life in the Western World, one has a first name and a last name, but SL limits one's choice of surname to one of a few dozen, with a seeming attempt to cover every culture known to man in that selection ... I think forty family names were available. As there are millions of distinct user accounts on the SL system, this results in some very predictable frustration as the would-be user chooses combination after combination, only to be told that it is not available. Finally, one grabs an exotic name out of the air thinking "I'll bet nobody has this one" and one is right. All users have been through this, and the problem is understood and yet, to my amazement, I could still see other users react strangely to the fictional name of the animated character I guided through a cartoon world, as if they could possibly be endangered by such a thing.
While virtual racism was hardly ubiquitous, some (mostly European and Midwestern US) users being very friendly and outgoing, it wasn't scarce, either. From the Teutonic surnamed icon whose user seemed to be attempting to physically attack me, oblivious to the fact that I was not my icon and my icon couldn't be physically injured even in the virtual sense by anything another user did, to the multitude of young female icons (many of whom, I had cause to suspect, were being run by lonely men in San Francisco's Castro District) whose owners would type expressions of revulsion and older ones which would act as if I had just tried to panhandle as I approached them, Second Life offered me a rich assortment of users who just, really, really badly needed to get a grip. I wondered how they would have reacted had they known that the "Arab terrorist" who they just cold shouldered away was, in fact, a nice Jewish boy from Chicago.
How would their perceptions have been affected as those who held them discovered that they mirrored stereotypes for a group to which the object of their supposedly righteous scorn and rage did not actually belong? Would come to see those perceptions as being something that their expectations had imposed on their supposedly fairminded and objective observations this time? Could they be motivated enough to wonder on how many other occasions they had seen the actions of others through such an easily distorted perspective? Might they consider the possibility that their prejudices might need more careful examination, or would they have clung to their delusional worries for dear life, inventing such facts as they needed to keep their fixations from perishing?
I suspect the latter would have been closer to the truth. Many users seemed to have a real problem in distinguishing between fantasy and reality, actually showing visible signs of feeling threatened by the swarthy giant of a stranger appearing on their screens, and in the process revealed a little more reality than they intended. My personality didn't change just because I created a new cartoon character. I was my usual low key self; their expectations did all of the work for them as they created threatening encounters in their own minds which had never existed in reality.
That's more than a stray nuisance that comes with the experience, it is something that, by its very nature, redefines the experience, and not in a good way. While one may be amused by the thought "by day, he tutors math students at Hillel over bagels and lox, by night he's the most confused operative in all of Al Quaeda", one should come back to what is what should be the basic question of one asks oneself about any social networking effort, online or off in which one participates - "Am I meeting the sort of people who I would be proud and happy to know and be known by, or at the end of the cliched day, am I going to be left wondering why I came, and why I didn't leave a lot sooner?" By now, I think that the question answers itself, and that the reader will not be surprised to hear that I retired my avatar.
Aside from offering me the company of those special souls who made me feel so glad that I had not filled out the "first life" section of my profile, Second Life offered me other delights as well, before I decided that the time had come for that game to be over. I had frequent browser crashes using SL, and this seems to be a common problem, if arguably not much of a loss, given how little of that virtual world one is free to explore - the concept of "private property" having made a major appearance in a setting where one finds people spending real money on fake land and seeing nothing odd about this. What we find is that on a site devoted to "your world. your imagination", what many users like to imagine is a world in which they get to chase everybody else off the beach and little is to be found other than virtual clothing stores and condos, populated by people who, if they can't have the decency to be Anglo-Saxon, can at least be courteous enough to fake it. Welcome to virtual Schaumburg.
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