What makes Second Life eerily powerful is the zero-distance between thinkers and technology

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Putting Up Layers: I've found the idea of proximity and acceleration in this fashion to be intriguing, too. We've been able to rub pixelated elbows with Thomas Barnett, Lawrence Lessig, Judge Richard Posner and other leading lights in SL, and it works the other way, too -- very famous people like Pierre Omidyaar can create an alternative character and not have their fame precede them.

However, I can't help thinking this is merely the heady early days and this won't last. Already, there is a backlash. Famous people are now learning to reject your friendship card, so that you can't see when they log on (they can also now hide their online status anyway). We're discovering that various metaversal consulting companies are having their staffs buy the names of famous people (to use your real name you have to pay $150 to Linden Lab), and are putting the avatars of RL people on SL to warm them up before the famous folks drop in for a few moments. You can't be sure, then, when a famous type seems to answer your or exchange cards or objects that it is really them -- it's the virtual world equivalent of lip-syncing -- av-syncing. We were told, for example, that when Kurt Vonnegut was on Infinite Minds in SL, he wasn't really logged on operating the avatar.

Famous or busy people also have myriad ways of putting up walled gardens around themselvse in SL, which itself is a sort of walled garden not everyone can enter without the right graphics card. They can ban you from parcels; specify group only and make a group joinable only upon invitation; they can even ban basic accounts with "unverified payment status" to keep out the unwashed masses.

For now, ordinary people interested in the issues of the day can interact on a fairly level playing field with early pioneers from Big Business -- but this is unlikely to last, as like existing inworld groups, more and more people are forced to lock themselves in due to rampant griefing.

As for the 0-distance from the technology, I think this is probably one of the best things to happen for technicians -- they now have the opportunity to really see and feel what it is like for ordinary people to use technology that simply doesn't work all the time and develops all kinds of bugs and problems. There is often a tendency to say all the problems are client-side. But if you have a way of rendering the client-side experience in some representational way for diagnostics server-side, this could really bridge the gap of indifference.; Posted by: Prokofy Neva Posted on: 12/15/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use