THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR — Mar 16 — Second Life (4.5 million registered) is "MySpace meets The Matrix" and is beta testing an integrated voice function that could substitute typed exchanges. In the near future members will circle virtual campfires, in photo-realistic avatar form, on a regular basis. Avatars have gone mainstream. Imvu.com already offers avatar-to-avatar chat. DigitalSpace.com creates 3D imaging for clients. FULL ARTICLE @ CS MONITOR
Mark Brooks: Watching a movie helps you escape into the story for a couple of hours. Second Life helps people truly escape, and become the story. There’s a real need for this kind of escape. I’m just a little disturbed that there’s a real need for this kind of escape. Are we spending a little too much time ‘plugged in.’
It worries me as well. I wrote a bit about Second life in my blog and I do intend to go back in there and do some more research, but a lot about it disturbs me to the point of not wanting to do it. A lot of people on there seem to take it far too seriously and it makes me wonder about how empty their real lives must be (especially when you realise how much of a time/effort/money investment it takes to get good representation there). I strongly dislike anything that takes away from one’s real life and gives the illusion that it is fulfilling the same needs.We have to remember, though, that we are dealing with early adopters. Early adopters of new social-interaction technologies are usually either very innovative people who can spot a good thing before anyone else or (far more commonly) people who are driven by their failure to succeed with current tools/technology/society. Look at online dating when that started. The stigma didn’t just invent itself, it came about because there were so many problematic people who turned to online dating in depseration. Then the rest of the world caught up with the advantages of the medium and now it’s mainstream. Sooner or later, SL and its rip-offs will be able to offer people the chance to map their own image to their avatar, there’ll be places offering background checks to make sure you are who you say you are and the whole thing will be the new face of the Internet, rather than a place to escape to when your real life sucks. For now, though, it’s full of furries and Goreans who have very little interested in reality anyway.