OK, I’ve been tardy in publishing the results of the poll posted to this blog on 22nd July. I’d asked “Which ONE of the following statements best describes your PRIMARY feelings about your Second Life experience?” The 17 options in the poll were, for the most part, almost verbatim reproductions of comments made to me, unsolicited, by a number of SL residents over the past twelve months (I tidied up syntax and spelling in some cases, combined similar comments in other cases, but otherwise left comments unchanged).
The informal poll did not check against gender, age, occupation, age of account, time spent per week in SL, and such like, so is obviously not scientifically reliable. It does, however, offer an interesting snapshot of attitudes.
152 people responded to the poll, as follows:
| SL is a great educational medium, a place where I can learn new things, enjoy great discussions, engage with intellectually inspiring people, meet artists and academics | 21.79% |
| SL is a great place to meet and socialise with new people whom I’d undoubtedly never have the opportunity to meet in my real life | 16.67% |
| I find SL quite inspiring, enriching my mind with new experiences and ideas that I’d probably never encounter in my real life | 15.38% |
| SL is for me a glimpse of the future, a place where–freed from the restrictiveness of real life–we can be whoever we CHOOSE to be, evolving as digital beings | 8.97% |
| I live in SL, period. It’s where I feel most authentically ‘me’ | 8.97% |
| SL is for me quite simply a way of relaxing, a great way to take time out once in a while from the demands and stresses of real life | 6.41% |
| SL is entertaining, simply just fun for fun’s sake, and I don’t take it too seriously | 3.85% |
| SL is frankly boring most of the time | 2.56% |
| I often find my in-world experience frustrating, as though I’m really not quite getting the best out of SL and can’t exactly figure out why | 2.56% |
| Hanging out in SL can be frankly time-wasting, and I’ve more than once questioned what the hell I’m doing there | 2.56% |
| Quite honestly, I find my SL experience stressful at times, with things often not quite working out in the way I’d like | 1.28% |
| I’m in SL uniquely for professional reasons, and have no other interest at all | 1.28% |
| Let’s face it: SL is an erotically charged environment, and frankly I feel pretty sexy there … and I love it! | 1.28% |
| I’m not sure I really ‘get’ SL, but I do find it endlessly intriguing | 0% |
| I find SL compulsive, and I probably spend more time in-world than I should | 0% |
| I like SL but do find it mildly disturbing at times, though I’m not really sure why | 0% |
| Other (unspecified) | 6.41% |
Some people take to Second Life like a duck to water; some just don’t ‘get’ it. Such, at least, has been my observation from working with adult learners, both university students and corporate learners. Working in the education sector, I was unsurprised that more than one in five respondents selected “SL is a great educational medium”; teachers and students are likely to constitute the largest constituency reading this blog. In retrospect, I should possibly have sought to avoid this bias.
Slightly surprising is that no one selected “I find SL compulsive, and I probably spend more time in-world than I should“. Several residents have, however worded, told me this time after time; and the evidence from heterogeneous sources points to a frighteningly large number of users for whom SL has become a very serious addiction, impacting destructively on their real lives. But my 152 respondents is a very small sample; and perhaps the real addicts don’t read blogs.
The Unlimited Dream Company 
There are other explanations too for no-one selecting “more time in world than I should.” You seem to have a fairly high proportion of educators for example (I’m pretty sure that’s how I found the survey), who have fairly strict other demands on their time and view SL as work time and plan it carefully, or it’s for research and too much time for research projects is a very subjective thing – I often worked 60-80 hour weeks during my PhD for example.
The other thing would be a look at age of oldest account. I’ve just turned 6 for example. If I was seriously addicted with a destructive impact on RL, then I wouldn’t still be active in SL – I’d be in jail, in deep debt or similar. There have been times in the past when I might have described my attitude as “compulsive and more time in SL than I should” (or I might have ticked a ‘I consider myself addicted’ box) but no longer – whether that’s adjusting RL to my habit so it’s no longer destructive or learning how to control the habit (“I can give up whenever I want” style) I’m not sure.
I also wonder just how many people are addicted – or how much they express the fact that they’re surprised they’re spending as much as they do in SL in rather hyperbolic terms. Although I’m not a professional musician, at one point I typically spent 15+ hours per week playing an instrument. That’s consider possibly eccentric but acceptable. If I said I spent the same 15+ hours per week that I no longer spend playing an instrument playing a video game a lot of people would brand me an addict – but I presumably have that much spare time in my week without impacting my ability to work so it’s not destructive.
Many thanks for those thoughts, Eloise. I’d addressed the issue of SL addiction in earlier posts (Away With The Faeries, Trapped in a Perfect World, The Myth of Sisyphus), and have spoken with several self-confessed addicts, including two senior academics. Whether they’re spending 15 or 50 hours a week in SL, people will be aware that as soon as the time they spend online is having an adverse impact on their real lives–on their partners, their children, their jobs, their health–then they are spending too much time in SL.
From a personal point of view, I recognised I’d been spending far too much time in Second Life quite simply in virtue of the fact that it dawned on me that I was time-wasting, being there for no more than the purpose of being there. So I quit entirely for two weeks and, since returning, have been spending no more than a couple of hours a week in-world.
All by way of confession that, had I myself taken the poll on a bad day, I’d probably have been honest enough to select I find SL compulsive, and I probably spend more time in-world than I should as outweighing every other feeling I had about SL. I’d been discussing this with a very dear friend for whom I have a lot of affection and respect; she wrote:
and that to me succinctly summed up what I’d heard from so many others.
‘Perhaps real addicts don’t read blogs” – or, perhaps people who are interested in SL are also interested in a balance between RL and SL – I don’t find an opposition, here, but an integration. my SL supports my RL which supports my SL which supports my RL… we have have seamlessness in all of our worlds, if we decide to! Thanks for this.
Thanks for the comment, peacefulamazon, and I wholly agree, since my own motive for getting into SL in the first place was to enhance and support real-world teaching and learning. But that then naturally anchored me in RL. For others, SL may be an evasion of real life; and, in that case, getting the balance right is crucial.