Week 11 - Online Communities - Second Life

“Social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace”

 Howard Rheingold (1993)

Second Life is a 3D world where inhabitants are all real people and every place you visit has been built up by people like you. Enter an endless possibilities world and live a limitless life, driven only by your imagination. Created in 2002 by the American company Linden Lab, available since 2003, reached in 2008, the year of highest spreading, over ten million users. 

To enter Second Life you need to download a software on your computer and register by choosing an avatar with which you will freely act in the simulated world. 

Second Life’s basic idea is to offer the chance to simulate reality, creating virtual characters and situations that actually allows everyone to experience a second and virtual life, playing in it the role that we prefer, as if it was real (to substitute forms of real life by creating a "second life" in which we place ourselves as if it were real).

Additionally to build their own identity, users can create any type of object, develop their own story, share emotions and even have trades one with another. 

SL represents a “place” that provides the opportunity to create a wide and heterogeneous community able to connect reality and the most extraordinary and weird worlds: the architecture or the avatar themselves can either reproduce precisely what belongs to the real world, either be entirely imaginary (the avatar, for example, can take form of any fantastic animal).

An important aspect of virtual reality is that it allows the interaction of more people moving within a single virtual environment, even when they find themselves separate from thousands of kilometers; moreover users are allowed to reproduce any kind of environment and social situation in order to meet and interact.

SL is a “no man's land” and at the same time “everyone’s land”, easily accessible (registration is only 10 US dollars), creating a parallel existence to the real one, without physical worlds limitations. 

You created a virtual world, whit its own dynamics, its own rules and its own scale of values, which is an ethical, moral and social challenge. 

If you want to use it, although it sounds obvious, you should always keep in mind that it is nothing more than a simulation in order to prevent the risk of one of the most dangerous threats of nowadays society: alienation.

F.P.