Curious Thoughts on Second Life
I’ve been in Second Life a few times this week and run into people I spent time with in 1st life lately. In these instances, they’ve told me SL doesn’t begin to compare with real life interaction. So now I’m curious as to why it was an acceptable surrogate before, but now seems unsatisfying. Here are my initial impressions, but I think I will need further exploration.
- My established SL presence doesn’t reflect my RL personality and causes cognitive dissonance.
- Once we’ve met in person and learned each other’s visual cues, it’s difficult to return to a virtual world where communication is mostly by text and the visual actions do not represent real life conversation.
- It is too close to our real life interactions and we will be able to re-establish our SL identities with the passage of time.
What do you think? Am I imagining things?
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:54 am
I agree that once I “meat” someone the interaction changes next time I see them in SL, but I don’t find it more difficult, usually I find it more casual.
And I do find that the longer I go without seeing people in RL, the more our SL relationship seems “normal”.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:35 am
Disclaimer - I still don’t get Second Life. The one time I enjoyed using it was hanging out with you, D’Arcy and Cindy one Saturday night (were Alec and Kyle there? I forget). I haven’t been in for a while, but it would be interesting to meet up with you in SL to find out how the experience has changed.
I think that for me, I might enjoy SL more since I know more of your visual cues and tone of voice, so I could project my RL experience onto your SL presence. If we had audio, it might be an even richer experience after RL contact.
I don’t think we could re-establish our SL identities over time. The real interaction is too experientially rich to be washed away by SL interaction. I think we might even find that our SL identities and interactions might come to resemble those in real life, not the reverse.
Regardless of results, it is an interesting social experiment, don’t you think?
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Those are curious thoughts indeed.
1. I don’t think I could ever find any virtual experience to be an “acceptable surrogate” for a real experience. I think that is asking far too much of technology. A picture of a beach is not the same experience as being at the beach but the picture can communicate information, record an event, or take our minds off of our long winters! I feel that SL is a complex of communication tools and people are still figuring out how to use them effectively. “Cognitive dissonance” is a good thing. It is the tension between what is believed and what one is learning. It is a very uncomfortable place to be in.
2. I work with people in SL and in First Life and there is a huge difference. I prefer to use voice in SL. That was a huge milestone in SL technology. It is as different as telegrams are to telephones. Texting and telephones, again, are virtual experiences and yet we have learned to use them pretty effectively. No one says, “talking to you on the phone is not like your physical presence so I do not want to use the phone.”
3. SL can be used to represent yourself virtually or other aspects of yourself. How do you explain Cable’s green man?? There are lots of ideal selves in SL but also animals, pirates, robots, skeletons, etc.
So I like the end of this posting where you ask “Am I imagining things?” That is what all of these technologies are ultimately about: a big Jungian projection machine.