IPUrbia

Grant McCracken, who writes a blog centered around the intersection of economics and anthropology, wrote a very long, analytical, and worthwhile piece on Second Life. While I don’t want to drift off, blog wise, too much into covering every Internet application–my focus is on the transit itself, not the applications thereon, nevertheless, Second Life is intriguing because it represents a very real example of a radically different sort of approach to the Internet than we currently have.

I find Second Life intriguing largely because it, oddly enough, is the exact opposite of innovation, in a way that is completely innovative. Second Life is EXACTLY like a futurist would have imagined the Internet to be before there was an Internet–a virtual world that seeks to be almost slavishly copied from our own. I think it is exactly because of the legacy of “futurist” mentalities that there is a buzz around Second Life and the speculative question: “Is this the direction of the Internet?”.

For my part, I certainly hope not. First of all, there is an inherent lack of possibility for true open design that is the brilliance of our current infrastructure. Regardless of how much control Linden Labs allows you–people can trade, they can build “real” virtual objects, they can even exchange Linden dollars for real dollars–at some point, that is all an illusion and the ultimate control rests, without question, with Linden Labs. Likewise, because of the investment of time and money for this sort of approach to the Internet, the concepts of “Net Neutrality” are irrelevant–the 30-40 hour weeks that World of Warcraft and Second Life seem to exact on their citizens really makes competition much more difficult–sure, you could switch to a competitor, but it becomes more of a divorce than a commercial transaction. You may spend time opening up a shop or building a house, but you will not spend a feverish month trying to create the “next Second Life” (would that be a Third Life or Second Life 2.0?).

For my part, I love the current philosophy behind our Internet. Perhaps because of wisdom, perhaps because of technical limitations, the initial designers of the Internet created a platform that has evolved into what can be best be described as a “support infrastructure” for our first life. We send emails and IMs that fundamentally create and support real-world relationships. We engage in on-line transactions that support real-world commercial exchanges. We network, we browse, we read, and we communicate in a virtual world, but for most of us, the end result are stronger real-world communications. We communicate with real-world colleagues, friends, and family that we might not otherwise, whether the geographical gulf is a crowded metropolis or 16 hours of international flights.

Behind virtual exchanges is often an implicit move/invitation towards real-world interactions–we may call and telephone friends and family, but we visit more often as well, feeling less awkward because we have maintained that relationship. We network and maintain professional relationships, but we (I at least) do hope that I’ll see better business opportunities and, to be crass, more real-world money (not Linden Dollars!). We blog, but that forum for information exchange perhaps just makes their real-world counterpart–conferences–all the more meaningful. Second Life removes that implicit invitation because the invitation itself is an acknowledgement that it is nothing more than a pale shadow of our real-world interactions.

Finally, the value of the online interactions is its efficiency and its ability to filter. We can filter through hundreds of individual voices a day to create the relationships that will actually have meaning to us. This is the nail behind McCracken’s general dislike of Second Life:

The other big hit against Second Life is that it sorts very badly. I haven’t actually met anyone I find illuminating. I am not asking that my SL network feed my real world network. I am not as pragmatic as all that. But I don’t want to step down my standards of conversation and curiosity just because I am on line. That’s, surely, not what the virtual world is for. If anything it should allow me to reach out to more people in the world and increase the chances that I will like the people I meet. But this never seems to happen.

This has been my experience as well. It may be because these virtual worlds are, at this point, meaningless, and so the people who congregate there tend to be vessels for largely meaningless conversation. If so, that may change if/when these virtual worlds become more meaningful. I’m pretty sure, however, that I don’t want that particular evolutionary step to happen.