Tim O’Reilly writes about the Business Week cover story on the online game Second Life:
Beth Goza of Second Life excitedly showed me the magazine, turning to the table of contents and showing me the picture of her avatar: “That’s me!” she said. She sheepishly added that people who didn’t spend as much time in SL as she does might not understand, but to her, it is just as much her picture as a photograph of her first-life body. She’s totally right: and for some people, the aptly named “second life” (which could easily be a description of the whole class of virtual worlds rather than just a particular virtual place) is as important as their first life.
God, that’s so sad.
You are a bad boy :-)
And a link-baiting one as well :-)
True, ideally, I would be vegged out in front of the TV, but surely a little person to person interaction in the darknets is ok once in a while?
Saying it’s sad is a value judgement. It’s nothing else than change… Societies, values and life styles change over time and it’s natural… Second Life is a form of very intense social exchange and activity! Cheers, Alex
Kingsley: Just until you need glasses, ok? Nick
Nicholas
I always love reading your interesting thoughts.
People said the same thing about bloggers (and still do in some circles).
Your blog is well written and you spend a significant amount of time communicationing and networking.
Exactly how is that different from using a different tool online such as Second Life?
We read Thomas Hardy and imagined following Michael Henchard through an imagined Wessex. We joined Paul Atreides in learned the secrets of the Spice. We engaged in those fictional worlds sometimes with as much passion or even more than the world that we really lived in.
Unless you also say “God, that’s so sad” about such involvement in literature, reconsider Second Life. Second Life is as rich and varied as any piece of literature. It is full of creative people redefining economies, understanding how to build communities, and engaging in dramas more interesting than you probably can imagine.
You stand at Waterhead telehub and meet new people, always curious about their first impression, then meet them two months later after they’ve built a business, met neighbors. It’s as transforming as Hardy if you go below the surface. It’s interactive, it’s involving, it bridges fiction and reality and inspires people to create their own fictional worlds.
Sad? No more so than reading fiction, especially since those fictional works are static, never-changing, and the experience is passive rather than active.
I think that Nick’s lack of geek street cred makes for incisive, insightful, and valuable commentary on information technology application which runs counter-intuitive to the geek ethos but is spot on as practical advice to the average businessman. He’s coming from a more business-oriented posture than the sci-fi and fantasy devotees who typify the ranks manning the IT trenches and I think a lot of the flak he catches for it is reactionary and poorly considered.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed that it’s the other way around when it comes to his various cultural commentaries. I’m not opposed to value judgements, but stuff like this really does seem a little silly at face value and more reactionary than insightful. It might be that it makes it easier for him to see through the gee-whiz factor of technology and cut to the chase if his view of the proponents is inherently negatively colored by their lives and hobbies, I don’t know. But I do know that there are a lot of very bright, capable, multi-faceted people (especially in the younger generations–and I’m not counted among them :) ) who find a lot of value in the time and relationships they have on-line, and I think it’s a mistake to dismiss their lives as sad out of hand and without better understanding them.
I think there are some things that can be sad about the geek lifestyle, but I don’t think that finding and enjoying new ways of interacting with other people is among them.
Being a regular reader then controversial views I’m used to, but trolling is not.
That said.
Excluding the case of infinite information, then the information capacity of subsystem is limited by its parent i.e. second life cannot be more “real” than “real” life.
Hence third life (if ever such a things is created or if it exists) where second life avatars can through second life create third life avatars in a system which exists as a subset of second life, cannot be more “real” than second life.
And so forth.
Which then leads to the question (as posed by Plato much more eloquently in allegory of the cave, and Aristotle and others) what is “real” life and how “real” is it?
Given such metaphysical questions and a raging historical debate which has no answers (yet), the lack of any absolute truths (beyond the trivially defined), then you can only conclude that if it makes her happy, it makes her happy and if Nick thinks it’s sad, well that’s his opinion.
The only response which gives any form of debate is to say –
“oh no it’s not sad” > “oh yes it is” > “oh no it’s not”
and let the pantomime continue.
Second life is a way for people to interact and communicate, even create a business, it just happens to be virtual. You can spend your real life in a virtual world or not, you can make a living from it or not, you can waste it or use it. It’s neither sad nor happy by nature, it depends upon what you make of it and what you want from it.
Come on Nick, why not hit us with something we can debate – “why evolution is not a suitable idiom for management theory” – or something of that ilke. This would be better than taking us down a subjective dead end with little more opportunity for discussion than the dead parrot sketch.
“No no he’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, init, ay? Beautiful plumage!”
“The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.”
“Nononono, no, no! ‘E’s resting!”
and so on.