Second Life received a lot of press in the Fall of 2006 and the following Spring. There were stories about fortunes being made, political candidates offering speeches, real world vendors setting up islands to sell their products, large companies like IBM making major investments, television shows like CSI NY using Second Life as an extension of their shows, and so on.
But the publicity often cut both ways. There were stories about a lurid sex trade, pedophilia, and infidelity. Following he 'get rich quick' stories there were 'get poor quick' stories about falling land prices and vendors pulling out.
The upshot is that Second Life has a major image problem from a business perspective. And marketing a product as a Second Life capability would be a real uphill battle. So, this capability to hold meetings in Second Life could not be marketed as such. In fact there should be no mention of Second Life what so ever.
Second Life meetings would conjure up images of griefer attacks, naked avatars parading around, people sneaking off to meet with escorts, and all manner of antisocial behavior. People wishing to hold business meetings would not find this an attractive prospect at all.
Instead it should be marketed simply as "Virtual Meetings". The benefits of Virtual Meetings should be emphasized which include cost savings, functionality and ease of use. People don't have to drive and park, or sit in airports and hotel rooms. Instead of loosing three days for an out of town meetings, only one day is lost.
Unfortunately, Second Life today is like a pristine wilderness inhabited sparsely by eco-friendly artists. It has potential, but in order to exploit that potential, some of the pristine quality of the wilderness must be loss. It is a 'hand in the cookie jar' problem. If you do not exploit the technology nobody will ever appreciate it. If you do exploit it, it will loose a lot of its original appeal.
Perhaps another analogy might be to say it is like having a priceless painting locked in a closet. Putting the painting on display could damage it. Restoration could alter it. And yet, leaving it in the closet is not an option because its value is derived from viewing.
The exploitation of Second Life will alter it forever. However,not exploiting it will leave it unappreciated forever. Personally, I would go with the exploitation and see where it takes us.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Second, Functionality
Last week I discussed performance issues and placed them first because no matter how great the functionality is that Second Life provides for meetings, if users log in and are bogged down by lag, they will not want to return. So, this week I am going to discuss some of the functionality required.This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. Instead, it is examples of the kind of customizations that would make the SL environment conducive to business meetings.
First, there needs to be some sort of an external meeting planner. This planner could invite people to meetings and remind them when meetings are approaching. When they log in, the meeting planner could give them the option of being teleported directly to their meeting. If they are on already and a meeting time approaches they could be notified and given a tp option.
Second there need to be default accounts set up for people holding meetings so that a person can attend a meeting using a default account. Some people may wish to attend a meeting and may not wish to have a Second Life account and all that entails. So, default accounts will allow greater accessibility.
Third, there needs to be greater support for the display and distribution of media. As it currently stands, you can get a PowerPoint presentation into Second Life and display it, but it is a royal pain. There should be an object in Second Life that will take a Power Point presentation from your hard drive, convert it, up load it and display it in Second Life. Further, there should be an easy way to distribute the presentation to others at the meeting and place the presentation in some sort of archive for people who missed the meeting. Similar capabilities should be available for the display and distribution of documents and other media.
Fourth, protocols need to be developed to prescribe proper meeting behavior. How does one ask a question? How do you take turns? Do virtual meetings follow the protocols of real world meetings or are there some differences.
These are major areas in which capabilities need to be developed if Second Life is going to be used successfully for meeting. Next are some minor 'nice but not necessary' features.
When an avatar shows up at a meeting they should have some clothing options to choose from. This may include a range of business attire or a collection of outfits that would be appropriate to the theme of the meeting. Avatars should be able to select an outfit with a click, and have it placed automatically on their avatar. If they don't like it, they should be restored to the original with another click. This business of paying nothing for a box, dragging it to the ground, etc, has got to go.
There should be a collection of meeting gestures readily available to the meeting attendees. For example, an avatar should be able to raise its hand while sitting to ask a question. Text gestures like "Joe Smith has a question" or "Bill Brown nods off" should be available and possibly even accessible through a HUD.
There should be some audience management capabilities so a speaker or a person running a meeting can queue up questions and get to them in turn. And finally, there should be an easily accessible meeting aid so that people who are attending a meeting can easily contact a person whose primary responsibility is to help people with questions about the environment.
As I said at the beginning, this is not intended to be an exhaustive list of functionality. It is intended to be examples. These are features that would be useful for meetings and not much else. Currently, Second Life focuses on generic functionality which makes it good for a lot of things while not particularly good for any specific thing. If it is going to catch on for business applications, that is going to have to change.
First, there needs to be some sort of an external meeting planner. This planner could invite people to meetings and remind them when meetings are approaching. When they log in, the meeting planner could give them the option of being teleported directly to their meeting. If they are on already and a meeting time approaches they could be notified and given a tp option.
Second there need to be default accounts set up for people holding meetings so that a person can attend a meeting using a default account. Some people may wish to attend a meeting and may not wish to have a Second Life account and all that entails. So, default accounts will allow greater accessibility.
Third, there needs to be greater support for the display and distribution of media. As it currently stands, you can get a PowerPoint presentation into Second Life and display it, but it is a royal pain. There should be an object in Second Life that will take a Power Point presentation from your hard drive, convert it, up load it and display it in Second Life. Further, there should be an easy way to distribute the presentation to others at the meeting and place the presentation in some sort of archive for people who missed the meeting. Similar capabilities should be available for the display and distribution of documents and other media.
Fourth, protocols need to be developed to prescribe proper meeting behavior. How does one ask a question? How do you take turns? Do virtual meetings follow the protocols of real world meetings or are there some differences.
These are major areas in which capabilities need to be developed if Second Life is going to be used successfully for meeting. Next are some minor 'nice but not necessary' features.
When an avatar shows up at a meeting they should have some clothing options to choose from. This may include a range of business attire or a collection of outfits that would be appropriate to the theme of the meeting. Avatars should be able to select an outfit with a click, and have it placed automatically on their avatar. If they don't like it, they should be restored to the original with another click. This business of paying nothing for a box, dragging it to the ground, etc, has got to go.
There should be a collection of meeting gestures readily available to the meeting attendees. For example, an avatar should be able to raise its hand while sitting to ask a question. Text gestures like "Joe Smith has a question" or "Bill Brown nods off" should be available and possibly even accessible through a HUD.
There should be some audience management capabilities so a speaker or a person running a meeting can queue up questions and get to them in turn. And finally, there should be an easily accessible meeting aid so that people who are attending a meeting can easily contact a person whose primary responsibility is to help people with questions about the environment.
As I said at the beginning, this is not intended to be an exhaustive list of functionality. It is intended to be examples. These are features that would be useful for meetings and not much else. Currently, Second Life focuses on generic functionality which makes it good for a lot of things while not particularly good for any specific thing. If it is going to catch on for business applications, that is going to have to change.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
First, Performance Issues
Second Life is a dynamic environment. If you have the right permissions, you can change the environment on the fly. You can create new objects, change the location and shape of objects. Or apply new textures to objects to give them a new look. In Second Life parlance this is referred to as 'building'. It is the act of creating the 3D environment. You can also change the behavior of objects. If a river is flowing east to west, you can change it to flow west to east. If a door opens on the right, you can change it to open on the left. In Second Life parlance this is referred to as 'scripting'. Both building and scripting make make the Second Life environment extremely dynamic which is why I said earlier that you can think of it as an extension of the imagination. However, there is a cost to all this dynamism. And that cost is performance.
When a simulator is slow to produce the 3D environment or when objects in the 3D environment do not perform their actions quickly enough it is referred to, again in Second Life parlance, as 'lag'. Here are some examples of lag. You might show up at a location and not see the location for a few minutes. You might appear in a crowd of people and not see the people for a few minutes. You might be walking across a room and your avatar looks like it is walking through molasses. You may raise your hand to ask a question and yet your hand does not go up. Or you may type a question into chat but not see the question until several lines later.
Lag is caused by a number of factors including the number of prims to be rezzed, the number of scripts running, and, yes, the number of avatars on the sim. This places a limit on the number of avatars that can be at one location. That number varies depending on how much lag you are willing to accept. However, a ball park figure for a maximum number of avatars in one location is 30. This creates problems if you want to have a meeting or a class or a conference with more than 30 people in attendance. When I teach my class in Second Life, I tell students not to follow me immediately to each location as having that many avatars show up at one location may crash the sim.
The solution here is to trade dynamism for performance. Unless you are having a meeting in which you are demonstrating or teaching building or scripting, you don't need that level of dynamism. Once the Second Life environment is created, it should be compiled down to a static environment and optimized for performance. Not only is it costly to have a sim for each 30 people, it is extremely inconvenience. Further, individual applications, such as meetings, can be optimized for different kinds of performance. For example, meetings should be optimized for gestures and chat, possibly also for displaying images such as PowerPoint slides or other media. A different application, say an amusement park, may be optimized for avatar movement and script performance.
The dynamic quality of the Second Life environment is wonderful for stimulating the imagination. And with imagination you can do almost anything. Unfortunately, with such a dynamic environment you cannot do anything particularly well.
When a simulator is slow to produce the 3D environment or when objects in the 3D environment do not perform their actions quickly enough it is referred to, again in Second Life parlance, as 'lag'. Here are some examples of lag. You might show up at a location and not see the location for a few minutes. You might appear in a crowd of people and not see the people for a few minutes. You might be walking across a room and your avatar looks like it is walking through molasses. You may raise your hand to ask a question and yet your hand does not go up. Or you may type a question into chat but not see the question until several lines later.
Lag is caused by a number of factors including the number of prims to be rezzed, the number of scripts running, and, yes, the number of avatars on the sim. This places a limit on the number of avatars that can be at one location. That number varies depending on how much lag you are willing to accept. However, a ball park figure for a maximum number of avatars in one location is 30. This creates problems if you want to have a meeting or a class or a conference with more than 30 people in attendance. When I teach my class in Second Life, I tell students not to follow me immediately to each location as having that many avatars show up at one location may crash the sim.
The solution here is to trade dynamism for performance. Unless you are having a meeting in which you are demonstrating or teaching building or scripting, you don't need that level of dynamism. Once the Second Life environment is created, it should be compiled down to a static environment and optimized for performance. Not only is it costly to have a sim for each 30 people, it is extremely inconvenience. Further, individual applications, such as meetings, can be optimized for different kinds of performance. For example, meetings should be optimized for gestures and chat, possibly also for displaying images such as PowerPoint slides or other media. A different application, say an amusement park, may be optimized for avatar movement and script performance.
The dynamic quality of the Second Life environment is wonderful for stimulating the imagination. And with imagination you can do almost anything. Unfortunately, with such a dynamic environment you cannot do anything particularly well.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Advantages of Meeting in Second Life
Before elaborating on the functional requirements of meeting support software in Second Life, it is useful to articulate the advantages of meeting in Second Life. With the advantages in mind, it is easier to define the capabilities necessary to support those advantages.
First, and foremost, the advantage of meeting is Second Life is logistical. Getting people to show up for a meeting in a conference room half a hallway away from their office can be a challenge. If people work on different floors, in different buildings, in different cities or different parts of the globe, this challenge becomes even greater. So, just the fact that you don't have to get up from your desk, whether at home or at your office, is an enormous benefit of meeting in Second Life.
The second advantage, convenience, is related to the first but distinct. When attending a meeting in Second Life you don't have to worry about transportation, parking, lodging or any of the usual hassles associated with traveling to a meeting. Further, you don't even have to get out of your pajamas. You don't have to shave or fix your hair. You don't even have to bathe. You can dress your avatar as you see fit and what you actually look like is irrelevant.
Third is the ability to multi-task. Normally, it would be considered to be rude to bring work into a meeting and then work on it while the meeting was going on. And yet, we all know how deadly boring meetings can be. However, while your avatar is respectfully sitting there appearing to pay attention, you can be working on something more interesting keeping an ear tuned to whatever might come up in the meeting. In addition, you can have side conversations with other people in IM, another feature that would be awkward in a typical meeting. Your confederate can even alert you if the topic of discussion turns to something you care about.
And, fourth, is the ability to record the meeting. Nobody likes to take minutes so meetings are often convened and dismissed with nary a note taken. Open chat and IM are easy to log. However, you could also record the meeting as a Quicktime movie for anyone who missed it or for later reference. If somebody does actually take minutes they can be used later to search for comments on a specific topic.
At the same time, there are three drawbacks of having meetings in Second Life. First, is the learning curve. Second is lag and the limitation on the number of avatars in a sim. And third is observation that in Second Life you don't get to see the faces of the people in the meeting. However, none of these drawbacks are hard to fix. And the benefits so far outweigh them that even if they couldn't be fixed they wouldn't be major detriments.
Next time I will address these drawbacks and begin talking about the functionality required to make Second Life meetings successful.
First, and foremost, the advantage of meeting is Second Life is logistical. Getting people to show up for a meeting in a conference room half a hallway away from their office can be a challenge. If people work on different floors, in different buildings, in different cities or different parts of the globe, this challenge becomes even greater. So, just the fact that you don't have to get up from your desk, whether at home or at your office, is an enormous benefit of meeting in Second Life.
The second advantage, convenience, is related to the first but distinct. When attending a meeting in Second Life you don't have to worry about transportation, parking, lodging or any of the usual hassles associated with traveling to a meeting. Further, you don't even have to get out of your pajamas. You don't have to shave or fix your hair. You don't even have to bathe. You can dress your avatar as you see fit and what you actually look like is irrelevant.
Third is the ability to multi-task. Normally, it would be considered to be rude to bring work into a meeting and then work on it while the meeting was going on. And yet, we all know how deadly boring meetings can be. However, while your avatar is respectfully sitting there appearing to pay attention, you can be working on something more interesting keeping an ear tuned to whatever might come up in the meeting. In addition, you can have side conversations with other people in IM, another feature that would be awkward in a typical meeting. Your confederate can even alert you if the topic of discussion turns to something you care about.
And, fourth, is the ability to record the meeting. Nobody likes to take minutes so meetings are often convened and dismissed with nary a note taken. Open chat and IM are easy to log. However, you could also record the meeting as a Quicktime movie for anyone who missed it or for later reference. If somebody does actually take minutes they can be used later to search for comments on a specific topic.
At the same time, there are three drawbacks of having meetings in Second Life. First, is the learning curve. Second is lag and the limitation on the number of avatars in a sim. And third is observation that in Second Life you don't get to see the faces of the people in the meeting. However, none of these drawbacks are hard to fix. And the benefits so far outweigh them that even if they couldn't be fixed they wouldn't be major detriments.
Next time I will address these drawbacks and begin talking about the functionality required to make Second Life meetings successful.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Virtual Meetings in Second Life
I have been talking about the creative and artistic potential of Second Life in recent posts. Now, to talk about using Second Life for meetings, I seem to be going from the sublime to the profane. And I apologize for that. But, if this technology is going to see its potential, it has to begin with some basic but important applications. Don't forget that the earlier adopters of the web did not see it as a commercial environment. And it wasn't until all the dot coms started showing up that the web started becoming a technological force to be reckoned with.
We can safely and fairly divide people into two groups with regard to virtual meetings. Group One feels that you can have virtual meetings in Second Life today so there is no need to consider meetings as a special application. Group Two is unwilling to log into Second Life because they find it bewildering. And there in lies the problem. The functionality needed to attract Group Two is considered too trivial to think about by Group One. But we are going to think about it nonetheless.
What kinds of thing would you have to do in order have a successful meeting in Second Life? Well, first of all you would need to get people to the meeting. One way to do this would be to have default accounts for people to log into that would automatically place them at the meeting. Another way is to have a feature that would automatically offer a teleport to the meeting to an avatar when it logs in. A third possibility would be to set the avatar's home to the meeting location. And a forth possibility would be to develop a meeting object, say a lapel button for the avatar to wear, that would automatically teleport it to the meeting when touched. Now, let's stop and think about this for a minute. People from Group One might say that this functionality could easily be developed. And that may very well be true. But somebody who wants to hold a meeting in Second Life does not want to have to develop it just to have a meeting. They want it to be available already and they want it to be easy to use. So, Group One already has a lot of work to do in order to attract Group Two.
Assume that a Group Two person managed to get their avatar to the meeting location. What next? Well, depending on the person they may want to go directly to the meeting. They may want to look around and get used to the virtual environment. They may want to pick up meeting materials. Or they may wish to pick out some clothes for their avatar. Again, Group Two people would probably say that everybody already knows how to do those things. But that is not true. The Group One people, who make up the vast, vast majority of potential Second Life users, have no idea.
Let's just consider the problem of finding new clothes for one's avatar in preparation for the meeting. In order to find clothes, one has to search for clothing places; they have to teleport to a store; and they have to buy a set of clothes. In order to buy the clothes they have to have money. When they buy the clothes, they usually get an object that needs to be dragged to the ground and opened. Frequently, they cannot do that at the store and need to go to a sandbox. Once they drag the container to the ground and have it rezz, they need to it and copy the items to inventory. Then they drag the items to their avatar. If dressing in real life where this difficult, most people would just walk around naked.
Instead, imagine a room with a row of pictures on the wall showing various outfits. A person can click on an outfit and have it immediately put on their avatar. If they don't like it, they can press a reset button or try on another one. If they like it, they can give it a name and put it on again later by simply typing in a command like "/wear gray suit" in open chat. The point here is to make the Second Life environment easy enough for a normal person to use. Normal people are not excited by the possibilities of Second Life. They just want to go to their meeting as painlessly as possible. And it is the snorts of derision from Group One people that are keeping the Group Two people out and keeping Second Life from fulfilling its potential. If the computer were kept in the hands of Group One people, it would still be computing missile trajectories and I would not be writing this blog.
Next time we will consider functionality to make the meeting go more smoothly and after than we will consider some fundamental changes that would need to take place in the base technology to support these kinds of applications.
We can safely and fairly divide people into two groups with regard to virtual meetings. Group One feels that you can have virtual meetings in Second Life today so there is no need to consider meetings as a special application. Group Two is unwilling to log into Second Life because they find it bewildering. And there in lies the problem. The functionality needed to attract Group Two is considered too trivial to think about by Group One. But we are going to think about it nonetheless.
What kinds of thing would you have to do in order have a successful meeting in Second Life? Well, first of all you would need to get people to the meeting. One way to do this would be to have default accounts for people to log into that would automatically place them at the meeting. Another way is to have a feature that would automatically offer a teleport to the meeting to an avatar when it logs in. A third possibility would be to set the avatar's home to the meeting location. And a forth possibility would be to develop a meeting object, say a lapel button for the avatar to wear, that would automatically teleport it to the meeting when touched. Now, let's stop and think about this for a minute. People from Group One might say that this functionality could easily be developed. And that may very well be true. But somebody who wants to hold a meeting in Second Life does not want to have to develop it just to have a meeting. They want it to be available already and they want it to be easy to use. So, Group One already has a lot of work to do in order to attract Group Two.
Assume that a Group Two person managed to get their avatar to the meeting location. What next? Well, depending on the person they may want to go directly to the meeting. They may want to look around and get used to the virtual environment. They may want to pick up meeting materials. Or they may wish to pick out some clothes for their avatar. Again, Group Two people would probably say that everybody already knows how to do those things. But that is not true. The Group One people, who make up the vast, vast majority of potential Second Life users, have no idea.
Let's just consider the problem of finding new clothes for one's avatar in preparation for the meeting. In order to find clothes, one has to search for clothing places; they have to teleport to a store; and they have to buy a set of clothes. In order to buy the clothes they have to have money. When they buy the clothes, they usually get an object that needs to be dragged to the ground and opened. Frequently, they cannot do that at the store and need to go to a sandbox. Once they drag the container to the ground and have it rezz, they need to it and copy the items to inventory. Then they drag the items to their avatar. If dressing in real life where this difficult, most people would just walk around naked.
Instead, imagine a room with a row of pictures on the wall showing various outfits. A person can click on an outfit and have it immediately put on their avatar. If they don't like it, they can press a reset button or try on another one. If they like it, they can give it a name and put it on again later by simply typing in a command like "/wear gray suit" in open chat. The point here is to make the Second Life environment easy enough for a normal person to use. Normal people are not excited by the possibilities of Second Life. They just want to go to their meeting as painlessly as possible. And it is the snorts of derision from Group One people that are keeping the Group Two people out and keeping Second Life from fulfilling its potential. If the computer were kept in the hands of Group One people, it would still be computing missile trajectories and I would not be writing this blog.
Next time we will consider functionality to make the meeting go more smoothly and after than we will consider some fundamental changes that would need to take place in the base technology to support these kinds of applications.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Video in Primative Cultures
I think I have an analogy that can provide some perspective on the problems that Second Life is having in getting traction. First consider all the ways in which we use video. It is hard to get your arms around all the uses. We use video for entertainment. We sell products via commercials. We inform people through news programs. We educate people through educational programs and train them with training programs. We use video to document events and to explore possibilities. In fact, the uses of video in today's culture are virtually endless.
Next imagine showing up at a village in the Amazon rain forest with video equipment trying to introduce the villagers to video technology. You give them cameras and take some video of villagers. They are all impress and every body wants to be in front of the camera. However, when it is their turn to do something, they are not quite as enthusiastic. They like it when you shoot the video but when it is their turn they cannot think of what to shoot. They are not really sure what they can shoot. They are not really sure what this technology is good for. "Everything," you say, "it is good for everything. The possibilities are endless." They might even agree that the possibilities are endless but still cannot come up with anything that they may want to do. So, you leave the village frustrated.
I think this analogy is apt because introducing virtual world technology in the early part of the 21th century is a lot like introducing video equipment to primitive villagers. There are a lot of Ooo's and Ahh's but few really grasp what can be done. And moreover, by thinking this analogy through a little further, I think we can see what needs to be done in virtual worlds to overcome this problem.
Let's say our visitor to the Amazon village had to get them to adopt video technology. Let's say they were working on a UN technology transfer grant or for some eccentric philanthropist just to make it believable. How would they get the villagers to accept video technology? Well, doing demos and talking about endless possibilities is probably not the way. This is way too ethereal and way to difficult to grasp.
What would make sense would be to select a single very concrete application to demonstrate the value of video. You might record the chief's speeches to the villages for historical value. You might record wedding ceremonies for their social value. You might record young hunters learning how to hunt for its educational value. It would probably be difficult to select one thing, but that is what you would have to do. Pick one thing and show how video is useful in that one case. Once people became more familiar with video they could see other uses. But, initially they would need a very concrete example.
I think the same could be said for virtual world technology in general and Second Life in particular. There are way too many possibilities and people need a concrete example. I think the uses that I discussed in the previous post for using Second Life for personal development are still not concrete enough. They are very compelling but probably not the place to start. I think the place to begin is with a very mundane, very concrete application. Perhaps something like using Second Life for virtual meetings. This application is as promising as it is boring. And I will take it up next.
Next imagine showing up at a village in the Amazon rain forest with video equipment trying to introduce the villagers to video technology. You give them cameras and take some video of villagers. They are all impress and every body wants to be in front of the camera. However, when it is their turn to do something, they are not quite as enthusiastic. They like it when you shoot the video but when it is their turn they cannot think of what to shoot. They are not really sure what they can shoot. They are not really sure what this technology is good for. "Everything," you say, "it is good for everything. The possibilities are endless." They might even agree that the possibilities are endless but still cannot come up with anything that they may want to do. So, you leave the village frustrated.
I think this analogy is apt because introducing virtual world technology in the early part of the 21th century is a lot like introducing video equipment to primitive villagers. There are a lot of Ooo's and Ahh's but few really grasp what can be done. And moreover, by thinking this analogy through a little further, I think we can see what needs to be done in virtual worlds to overcome this problem.
Let's say our visitor to the Amazon village had to get them to adopt video technology. Let's say they were working on a UN technology transfer grant or for some eccentric philanthropist just to make it believable. How would they get the villagers to accept video technology? Well, doing demos and talking about endless possibilities is probably not the way. This is way too ethereal and way to difficult to grasp.
What would make sense would be to select a single very concrete application to demonstrate the value of video. You might record the chief's speeches to the villages for historical value. You might record wedding ceremonies for their social value. You might record young hunters learning how to hunt for its educational value. It would probably be difficult to select one thing, but that is what you would have to do. Pick one thing and show how video is useful in that one case. Once people became more familiar with video they could see other uses. But, initially they would need a very concrete example.
I think the same could be said for virtual world technology in general and Second Life in particular. There are way too many possibilities and people need a concrete example. I think the uses that I discussed in the previous post for using Second Life for personal development are still not concrete enough. They are very compelling but probably not the place to start. I think the place to begin is with a very mundane, very concrete application. Perhaps something like using Second Life for virtual meetings. This application is as promising as it is boring. And I will take it up next.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Second Life for Personal Growth
In this post I want to explore three ways in which Second Life can contribute to your personal growth. These include enriching experiences, role switching, and overcoming social anxieties. This is not to say that these are the only three ways in which Second Life can contribute to your personal growth. It is merely to say that these are the ways that come to mind at the moment.
There are some fairly standard ways in which we enrich ourselves in real life. Most people would say that travel is enriching. Many would say that visiting art galleries and museums is enriching. Some would say that taking classes or doing volunteer work helping people is enriching. All of these things are possible in Second Life and you don't even have to leave your desk to do them. I visited an island recently called Suffugium. It is a cyberpunk rendering of a future world. I have actually been there many times and I am always astonished at the effort that was put into the place to provide an interesting and artistic experience for the visitors. You can walk around this wonderful location and experience the art and the political message. It simulates your thought and your creativity. And, there are hundreds of other similar locations, each one unique, which provide enriching and thought provoking messages and experiences.
The second way in which Second Life can provide you with personal growth is through role switching. We are who we are and we tend to see life from our very own perspective. But, how does the world appear differently to people of the other gender? Do younger or older people see things differently? Are life experiences different for people of a different social class or ethnicity? Do people of a different sexual orientation get treated differently? How can you know the answers to these questions without changing who you are and going out into the world as somebody else? The answer, of course, is that in Second Life you can do just that. And if you do, you will be astonished at how different life presents itself to you. Seeing the world through the eyes of others is good for you. It broadens your perspectives, and helps you become more compassionate, understanding and tolerant. All good stuff.
Finally, many people suffer from social anxieties such as shyness, fear of crowds, or fear of speaking in front people. It is possible to limit the impact of these anxieties through systematic desensitization. For example, you may speak in front of one person, then two, then three and so on. However, this systematic desensitization in real life can still be difficult. Just setting up the scenarios can present logistical problems. And you may still be afraid of blushing or shaking. In a virtual world you can take baby steps to overcoming these anxieties. People do not actually see you, they only see your avatar. So you get a bit of protection. But, even more importantly, people in a virtual world are much more supportive and much less judgmental than they are in the real world. So the barriers are lower.
These are just a few of the ways in which Second Life can help enrich and improve you. Unfortunately, this capability exists today largely as a possibility. And one of the most frustrating things about Second Life is that all these possibilities exist simultaneously with none of them being fully exploited.
There are some fairly standard ways in which we enrich ourselves in real life. Most people would say that travel is enriching. Many would say that visiting art galleries and museums is enriching. Some would say that taking classes or doing volunteer work helping people is enriching. All of these things are possible in Second Life and you don't even have to leave your desk to do them. I visited an island recently called Suffugium. It is a cyberpunk rendering of a future world. I have actually been there many times and I am always astonished at the effort that was put into the place to provide an interesting and artistic experience for the visitors. You can walk around this wonderful location and experience the art and the political message. It simulates your thought and your creativity. And, there are hundreds of other similar locations, each one unique, which provide enriching and thought provoking messages and experiences.
The second way in which Second Life can provide you with personal growth is through role switching. We are who we are and we tend to see life from our very own perspective. But, how does the world appear differently to people of the other gender? Do younger or older people see things differently? Are life experiences different for people of a different social class or ethnicity? Do people of a different sexual orientation get treated differently? How can you know the answers to these questions without changing who you are and going out into the world as somebody else? The answer, of course, is that in Second Life you can do just that. And if you do, you will be astonished at how different life presents itself to you. Seeing the world through the eyes of others is good for you. It broadens your perspectives, and helps you become more compassionate, understanding and tolerant. All good stuff.
Finally, many people suffer from social anxieties such as shyness, fear of crowds, or fear of speaking in front people. It is possible to limit the impact of these anxieties through systematic desensitization. For example, you may speak in front of one person, then two, then three and so on. However, this systematic desensitization in real life can still be difficult. Just setting up the scenarios can present logistical problems. And you may still be afraid of blushing or shaking. In a virtual world you can take baby steps to overcoming these anxieties. People do not actually see you, they only see your avatar. So you get a bit of protection. But, even more importantly, people in a virtual world are much more supportive and much less judgmental than they are in the real world. So the barriers are lower.
These are just a few of the ways in which Second Life can help enrich and improve you. Unfortunately, this capability exists today largely as a possibility. And one of the most frustrating things about Second Life is that all these possibilities exist simultaneously with none of them being fully exploited.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
