McNutt Against the Music

You know, I like to think I’m pretty ‘hip’ when it comes to new media. I blog, I listen to podcasts, I follow Wikipedia, all of it with a critical eye but also admiration for the new and innovative ways that people across the world are choosing to communicate. And those few times where I’ve viewed internet technologies with scorn – blogs, initially, back when they were primarily a vehicle for teenage confessionals – they’ve always come back to impress me in due time.

And yet, every now and then something comes along that I find so unfathomable and mind-bogglingly ridiculous that I revert to sounding like a baby boomer complaining about what “the kids” are up to these days (even though its rarely the kids alone who adopt these things).

In this case, it’s Second Life.

If you haven’t heard of Second Life yet, don’t worry – it’s at that point where it’s JUST about to break into mainstream consciousness, with the media finally starting to pick up on the phenomenon. In the past year, the virtual online community has seen its population skyrocket from 100,000 to over a million (although usually only around 10,000 or so are ever online at any one single time).

Second Life is not a game, although many will dismiss it as such, if only because its precursors were games. It combines the virtual worlds and characters of “massively multiplayer online role-playing games” (MMORPGs) like “Everquest” and “World of Warcraft” with the customization of the massively popular “Sims” series.

Here’s how you start: you make your own avatar, which may look like you, or it can be anything from a dragon to a smurf to an alien.You can walk around the ever-increasing virtual world and mingle, or you can purchase land (available in Linden dollars, of which 250 cost roughly one real dollar) and build your own business or home. All sorts of companies and individuals create and sell products in Second Life, all made out of customizable “virtual atoms” called “primitives” that can be turned into pretty much anything you want, from pianos to paintings to household objects.

Sound elaborate? That’s the point. Second Life isn’t just a gimmicky title – it’s a complete world where you can do whatever you’d like, from having sex to going skydiving to holding classes or lectures to doing an interview with a Second Life journalist (as former Virginia governor Mark Warner did earlier this year – as his virtual self). The creators and overseers of Second Life, Linden Lab, are relatively hands off when it comes to what goes on in their virtual economy – while there are some rules (in particular with regards to keeping children away from adult content and situations), Second Life might just be the most unfettered free market on the planet.

Now, if your first reaction was the same as mine – what the hell is wrong with all of these people? – I don’t blame you. But a lot of people are jumping on the Second Life bandwagon. Many of the biggest companies and organizations in the world are starting up branches within Second Life to promote their real-life products and sell variations in the virtual world. You can see a full list here, but they include Dell, Disney, American Apparel, MTV, Reuters, Telus, and Toyota. PR agencies have gotten in on the game, with American companies Edelman and Crayon getting in on the mix. Internet-PR guru Shel Holtz is aggressively championing Second Life, creating a regular podcast about the program’s marketing and communications potential and is one of many declaring it the start of Web 3.0. And heck, check out this declaration of purpose from Linden Lab chairman Mitch Kapor, the guy who invented the Lotus spreadsheet (from a good Economist article about Second Life that’s worth a read):

It promises to be “disruptive”, says Mitch Kapor, the inventor of the Lotus spreadsheet that played a big role in the personal-computer revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. He is now chairman of Linden Lab. To him, Second Life is comparable to both the PC and the internet itself, which started as something “quirky” for geeks, and then entered and transformed mainstream society. “Spending part of your day in a virtual world will become commonplace” and “profoundly normal,” says Mr Kapor. Ultimately, he thinks, Second Life will “displace both desktop computing” and other two-dimensional “user interfaces”. As “a hothouse of innovation and experiment,” he says, Second Life may even “accelerate the social evolution of humanity.”

He’s being more than a little hyperbolic, but his point about social evolution is not as far off as you might think. Of course, what he finds exciting and groundbreaking, I find depressing and perplexing – to each their own.

My first reaction to Second Life was pretty much the same as Robin wrote about a week or so ago: that no one that she knows in the real world right now uses Second Life, and that she doesn’t get the point of existing in an online world when she could be doing so in real life. Of course, the problem with “real life” is its subjectivity – and the fact that it often really, really sucks. This is why we have increasingly devoted much of our free time to finding ways to forget that it really, really sucks.

Whereas in the distant past the purpose of storytelling was historical, to create legends and narratives, increasingly it became used to distract and to entertain. Todd Gitlin’s book Media Unlimited (which I might have been the only person from Dr. Dennis’ American history class to actually like) looks at this in detail, how the multimedia torrent that engulfs our daily lives really doesn’t exist to inform but to create images that amuse and gratify, allowing us to escape from our day-to-day reality. Why else, do you think, have video games remained popular with adults long after they’ve put aside most of their other adolescent amusements? Because it takes the immersion of television to the next level – now, instead of just escaping into a world in pictures, you actually control that world.

In many ways, Second Life is just the evolution of twentieth century escapism. That it’s less-fantastical than its videogame predecessors (crazy character designs aside) only demonstrates that there is a market for a second life that is somewhat ordinary just as much as one that is fantastical (kind of like how teen dramas like Degrassi can co-exist on the dial with absurd fantasies like The O.C.). Increasingly, our lot in life is not to question the world around us for its shortcomings, failures and clusterfucks, but instead, to find ways to distract ourselves from it.

(Perhaps my point is that this stuff is brilliant at making people forget their larger capitalist angst. Seriously, Karl Marx would have a field day with Second Life.)

Do I think that Second Life will become this revolutionary new medium, as Kapor and Holtz seem to think? I doubt it. First, simply because I think its ability to reach out beyond a niche audience is going to be more limited than its proponents argue. Seriously, ask any 10 random people on the street if they’d be interested in Second Life, I bet you’re lucky to find one person who would be.

But more importantly, it’s going to fall peril to the problems of the real world that people are using it to escape from. Yes, right now there is much good being done through Second Life – from support groups for disease and loss to the American Cancer Society holding a virtual Run for the Cure – but an unfettered free market only works so long as its participants are committed to a greater good beyond merely the earning of capital – in this case, it appears to be the value of the community. As the size of Second Life grows into the millions and as more and more corporations begin to move in, the sense of community that is currently holding things together will likely splinter, to be replaced by a quest for virtual profit.

Now, perhaps in the virtual world people will unite and form strong, people-powered governments to act as a counterbalance to the role of corporations. But considering how well that’s worked in our current reality, I have my doubts. No, instead you’ll likely see a virtual world that becomes so much like ours – albiet with flying dragons and terrorist smurfs – that the whole idea of escaping to it seems as foolish to its one-time proponents as it does to people like you and me today.