In this first of several polls we’ll post to this blog over the coming months, we’d like to sound you out on a very simple question: How do you feel about Second Life? about your experience of being there?
Note that it’s not about what you do, how you spend your time, in SL (we’ll ask that question in a future poll), but rather about your raw feelings. If you’ve had an account for some while the chances are that you’ll by now have a variety of perhaps quite mixed feelings about the environment, represented by maybe more than one of the statements in the poll below. Yet perhaps one of the statements resonates with you more than any other: that’s the one we want to hear from you!
So please take your time to read the statements, maybe spend a little reflective time in Second Life before you respond to the poll, then select the statement that seems to you to best capture your most fundamental gut feeling about your SL experience. And, if your deepest feelings are not represented by any of the statements given, please feel free to add your own at the bottom of the poll. If you feel you need more space to express your views, please also use the Comments.
Thanks for participating! The results of the poll and analysis of those results will be published in this blog on Saturday, 20th August.
Second life is wonderful. It gives me the opportunity to meet people from all over the world. I also enjoy building with 3 d images.Second life is a portal in gaming only limited buy your imagination and prim allowance.
I choose “I live in SL, period. It’s where I feel most authentically ‘me’” but that answer isn’t 100% complete, so I have to change it a bit with the followed comment
“I live, work, make friends all over the wold and having great time in events and parties, in SL….”
Second Life is an addition to my real life….and that’s “period”
I voted for SL being a great way to take time out but I also find SL inspiring. All the creative people that contribute to SL amaze and inspire me and I find myself wanting to learn and contribute myself however my real life career doesn’t leave a lot of room for this so I’m content to just enjoy and support that people that do, where I can.
SL is a place where I can do anything, be anything, build anything- for free or at very little cost.
It’s also my personal answer to a few things I am lacking in my 1st life at the moment.
For starters, my girlfriend and I are in a long-distance relationship (both go to college in different states) so we use SL as a medium to communicate and interact with one another on a more personal level than just phone or
Another is the cost. It’s free to play and there are tons of very good quality freebie things out there if you don’t like to build and create yourself.
Another is the creativity. There are tons of ways to build and create in SL, whether that’s modding something that has already been made or making something new entirely from scratch. You can literally make just about anything in SL, so long as you can imagine it. Everything here is user-created, and that’s just awesome when you think about it.
And speaking of user-created-content, there are a ton of people that I can meet here in SL that I couldn’t meet otherwise due to both distance and time. I’m very busy as a student in 1st life (I can be in class as early as 7am and as late as 10pm depending on the day- and that’s not even counting the homework I’m busy with!) and I often just don’t have the time to get dressed up, go out and interact with other people physically at clubs and whatnot. SL allows me to have a social life on my time when I need it.
SL is just all-around perfect for me at this stage in my life. Whether or not it will continue to be throughout my life is a mystery, but seeing as how it’s such a useful and fun tool, I don’t see why not.
**phone or other 2D messengers.
Guess I got cut off there, LOL!
I use SL to educate but also to experience something impossible in RL; Time Travel.
SL offers me the opportunity to visit Berlin in the 1920s and share my passion for that place and time with others.
If you’ve read any of my articles on H+, you’ll know I view SL as a prototype of the real world in a decade, once VR has become a practical reality. The object creation menu prototypes 3d manufacturing, nanofactories, and morphological matter. The Avatars reflect the morphological freedoms we will obtain, as well as enable us to explore a world in which every aspect of our identity is a matter of personal choice, not an accident of genetics. It is the world we are building daily, where past and future and now all exist simultaneously, and every dream and nightmare of the human psyche will become manifest. Everything you listed in that poll will be something every human on this planet will have to come to terms with, both good and bad, because we WILL turn our reality into SL.
Warmest thanks to all those who’ve posted comments–please keep them coming!
And thanks, Valkyrie, for yours which raises interesting and obviously important issues on which I’d welcome further discussion. The technological ramifications, too momentous to do justice to in this brief comment, will be for a further post; and I’d encourage you, Valkyrie, to consider posting an article to this blog yourself.
Addressing another issue, you write “we WILL turn our reality into SL”. Linden Lab is a for-profit company, currently not in the best of financial health, whose strategies for SL will be dictated by the imperative to run a commercially profitable operation. Vehemently anti-corporate in my real life, I’d feel uncomfortable surrendering my online future to the vicissitudes of corporate profitability and everything that this implies with respect to the underlying cultural ethos of the environment. Maybe this is a topic worth exploring further?
*giggle* I’ve addressed most of that already.
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/virtualization-rise-avatar-open-sim-project
http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/virtualization-avatar-mirrorworlds-part-two
http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/virtualization-virtual-reality-part-3
http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/toys-tools/graphene-next
http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/quantum-dots-future-vr
http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/02/14/adding-our-way-to-abundance/
Phew! thanks for the homework, Valkyrie! I shall read with enjoyment! Set me a short written test later, if you wish
OK, Valkyrie, I’ve read through those links. Fascinating and important … but I don’t see that you’re addressing therein what, to me, seems the most worrying issue, viz. “surrendering my online future to the vicissitudes of corporate profitability and everything that this implies with respect to the underlying cultural ethos of the environment”. I’ve still never quite recovered from the cultural trauma of taking my 8 year old son to Disneyland Paris … and that was 14 years ago.
I’d say you skimmed them, and you missed the last one specifically.
Corporations are in their last days, and they are hurrying themselves along to extinction as fast as they can, Specifically, as 3d printing becomes the dominant manufacturing process, due to the need to get products to market in shorter and shorter time frames, the corporations will see vast profits to be made by eliminating “factories” “Inventories” and “transports” and moving to a “store based printer”, which will then evolve into “home based printers” and “virtual stores”
Now, since the corporations will make profits the entire way, this is a foreseeable evolution. They make goods for less, push more and more of the cost on the end consumer (making us pay for manufacturing costs while continuing to charge nearly as much as before) and lay more and more highly skilled workers off in favor of automation.
The problem is that 3d printers are a double edged sword. As the means of production are increasingly placed into the hands of the masses, those masses will have little choice but to learn how to use them to provide for personal needs. It’s inevitable that corporations will seek to ensure that customers HAVE to stay “addicted” to their products by trying DRM for manufactured goods. But as the iPhone has shown, we WILL find a means to “jailbreak” the printers and create a black market for “non-DRM” products that will cater to the “long tail” and provide printable goods of equal quality to the “corporate” goods but which are open source, and created by the masses. As more and more people get laid off by corporations automating and reducing costs in order to attempt to remain profitable (in an economy in which their products have to sell for less and less to sell at all due to fewer numbers of consumers, because the WORKERS they are firing ARE THEIR CONSUMERS, a vicious cycle that they have no hope of reversing) then those workers are going to turn to 3d printers to try and make a living. This will basically eliminate the ability of manufacturing to maintain it’s place as a “Gatekeeper” and will open them up to competition from every side. Much like what has occurred in SL, the “Big Dogs” will find that they are non-competitors in a market in which EVERYONE has the ability to make their own, or acquire a “non-brand name” product of equal or greater quality FOR FAR LESS THAN THE CORPORATION CAN AFFORD TO SELL FOR.
Every step of this process logically proceeds from the previous, and from a corporate perspective, is the only solution which maximizes short term profitability. It is however a long term fatal move, accelerating at high speed directly towards a cliff which will end the era of corporations in favor of an economy of abundance in which all material scarcity has been eliminated in favor of non-material forms of “wealth” (i.e. physical items will be worth less than the 3d designs that make them, and those designs, like most non-physical goods, are worth MORE the more widely available they are, as opposed to current systems where rarity determines value)
Now, once the 3d printing revolution is underway, and we can not only create physical goods, but biological ones, and have the ability to “object create” in RL, and even modify ourselves at will, the same “weirdness” the permeates SL (due to the unlimited abilities to exercise personal choice) is going to invade RL, and things which previously could only be done in SL (or any other VR world) will be possible IRL
We will thus turn RL into what SL is presently, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER SL CONTINUES TO EXIST OR NOT. This future is not dependent on SL continuing viability as a company.
OK, I’ve re-read your last article, Valkyrie, and I think I now get your point (and, yes, I confess (forgive me) that after reading every word of the first four articles, I did indeed find myself skimming the last two.
I’m not persuaded I’d feel much at ease at the prospect that “We will thus turn RL into what SL is presently”, since in most respects I dislike SL (one reason why I’m now taking an extended ‘holiday’ from SL).
Much as I should, in an ideal world, dearly love to see ownership of the means of production pass into the hands of the masses, my curmudgeonly pessimism renders it hard for me to envisage this happening … worse, makes me fear for the future of humankind in the event that it does happen. (Jaded cynic that I am, I’m foreseeing billions of dirty old men left-handedly manipulating their 3D printers to run off copies of Lady Gaga, Jennifer Aniston, beer, and pizzas.)
Hun, I’m a succubus. I’m every bit as jaded as you are. But Porn has existed since the cavemen first painted big breasted “venus’s” on cave walls and fashioned the first dildos out of rock (about 10,000 b.c.) I’m quite positive that sex is going to continue to drive nearly every thing humanity does. I also expect the worst impulses of human nature to continue to dominate over it’s better ones.
The problem is that for all of that pessimism, humanity is predictable over the long term, even though short term trends are chaotic. I don’t see these things occurring out of optimism. I see them happening because they are inevitable consequences of greed, short-sightedness, and our push for “bigger better faster more!” We’re going to be greedy little assholes demanding our sexbots, and virtual “clothes strippers” so we can walk down the street seeing all the girls naked. We’re going to want perfect bodies to enhance our abilities to get laid. We’re going to demand body customization to get our bigger cocks and always wet pussies. We’re going to demand our new cell phones be available with more features and faster connections and more programs just so we can lord it over our friends who have last weeks models… We’re always going to want to “prove” we are better than everyone else, and find ways to get our rocks off, it’s genetically programmed into us.
I’m a complete cynic. If there’s a pointless, stupid, sex related way we can mis-use technology, we will find it. But once that technology has been made, it will still have predictable effects, as well as secondary effects caused as a reaction to the primary ones. It’s those “unforeseen” secondary effects that I spend most of my time exploring, because those are the ones which will have the most dramatic long term impacts.
I admire your optimism, Valkyrie … as my equally cynical and recently departed friend, Kader Asmal, so often put it: “the triumph of hope over experience”.
The most amazing thing about SL is that the possibilities are truly what you can imagine, on any and all levels;
Socially, you can make connections with people in real time from all over the planet.
Professionally, SL allows people to set-up meetings in a particular venue without having to travel, this provides educational opportunities too.
Creatively, you can make and do whatever you imagine and display your work for a world audience and be paid for it!
Conceptually, you can create designs in SL to build in RL and save hundreds of dollars on models by seeing what the outcome will be and make modifications to what you have created.
Performers can participate by performing their talents in real time and again have the world as their stage and be compensated for that, as well as perform any hour of the day and night. There is also the possibility of putting SL and RL together in real time as I and others have done, merging the two for the benefit of both; for example the upcoming event at SL’s Club Republik on August 6th that will be seen in the RL club that the music is being streamed from.
SL like any technology, is a fabulous tool, if used well. I do not see it replacing real life.
“SL like any technology, is a fabulous tool, if used well. I do not see it replacing real life”
SL has become a platform of mixed reality; an extension of my reality so to speak. Perhaps it may not replace RL but it sure can affect it, change it, enhance it and be a bridge between worlds.
I’ve seen many a RL relationship blossom out of the virtual one, including myself
Thanks so much for the comment, BC, and I agree with you. One of the stimulating things about this blog, however, is the balance of radically divergent views, the polarity probably best represented by the articles written by Extropia and myself. Both views deserve respect and serious consideration; and I’d therefore encourage you to browse other posts, enjoy the sometimes heated discussions in the Comments, and consider subscribing to this blog. We’d love to see you back here.
I would have liked to select several of the options you provided. Perhaps rank ordering them.