My brain hurts this week.
Actually, it hurts most weeks, but this week it’s something like an ice cream headache – the Second Life Community Convention was all yummy goodness but you eat it all all up so fast and you’re left with, hmmm…an almost pleasurable lightning bolt throb.
Who could resist, really – on the main track with the keynotes you had M showing his photo album, and Pip talking about how we’re on the prairies which is about to become Manhattan, and Ray Kurzweil promising immortality, and Tom Hale showing off a new viewer, mesh imports, media-on-a-prim, all kinds of tasty stuff – a giant ice cream cone with sprinkles.
So I came out of San Francisco and posted about Linden Lab’s plans and how it will propel them towards – well, towards a liquidity event most likely. A sale, an IPO (less probable), a merger. And I still think that’s true. I don’t think Linden Lab as it exists today will be here in 2011. It will have been swallowed up into….well, into something else. We’ll have to wait and see. In fact, I have this really weird feeling that it will happen even sooner – as in ‘nearly imminent’ but that’s just that ice cream headache tingle I suppose.
Now at the end of my “Second Life is taking over social media” post I also said that there were some other perspectives on their march towards mass acceptance and a sudden boom in enterprise use and a co-opting of the very idea of what it means to be on the Web – in fact, I propose, and still do, that the Lab is managing to do something that others outside maybe the mobile industry can’t do, which is to provide an alternative to the Web itself (yet tightly interlinked with it and, if course, using all that cable).
And I was trying to find a way to talk about it. The “on the other hand” stuff. Because my line is always pretty much the same, especially when I bump up against those people who don’t own cell phones or who believe that Facebook is like rock music – the end of our youth, of culture, of society itself. And the line is this: technology holds both promise and peril and we have an obligation as thoughtful people to recognize both, your fear of technology should be balanced with another view of what it can do, just as my embrace of technology is tempered by fear of its misuse.
Second Life and Humanizing Technology
So I had this idea – that Second Life as a brand, well, isn’t one. It has the potential to be one but it needs a strong vision. Philip Rosedale commented on my post on this a while back and then was kind enough to come up and talk to me when he saw my name badge at SLCC and sort of confirm this idea that maybe somehow Second Life can be about humanizing our experience of technology.
As I posted:
“So maybe there’s something in that “Second Life” thing…it’s life, only better. It’s technology, only it doesn’t FEEL like technology. It’s being able to do cool stuff with code but not knowing that you’re coding. I’m not sure.”
So where we stand a few weeks later is a sort of uber-view of technology as seen through the new Second Life Web site, and as seen in having Kurzweil present at SLCC, and as seen in how M and Pip kept warning us: “stuff is going to change and you may not like it but it will all be good”….because, well, growth is good, technology is good, and we’ll all be able to upload our brains one day.
Off the Beaten Track
There was another side to the Second Life Community Convention as well. After the shiny stuff that was presented each morning (aside from Kurzweil who phoned in his keynote and then read from the dust jacket of his book) there was the alternate reality.
There were great discussions, and roll-up-your-sleeve sessions, and there was meeting amazing people. Armi said it best:
“But when the avatar is standing right in front of you, bridging that impossibly wide digital gap is as easy as reaching out with your hands. And so we did it, over and over again. We did it with handshakes, arm touches, kisses and especially hugs. Men and women, women and women and even men and men. Hugs so long and tight they were the most intense experience. The touch, always the touch, as if it would never occur again. ”
But on the other hand, there was the very odd experience of hearing Int’Libber talk about the value of griefers and how he puts them to good productive use in his organization. And there was MarketTruths talking about how the average pay for work in Second Life is in the 2 figures – as in 90 cents an hour or something insane. And there was the lack of response by Linden Lab to ideas for how to improve the music business in Second Life, about which Grace had a thoughtful post.
A Place Called Home
See – as much as the road map is going to give us new tools for creation, and new ways to connect with one another, one of the things that makes it work is the mixture of chaos and cultural mix-ups, change and, one would hope, stability where it matters, like in being able to stay logged on.
Against this background we have the Second Life Web site. Which is gorgeous, and usable, and fairly functional (the map thing, which I loved when I saw it at SLCC doesn’t work for me but maybe they’ve fixed it).
But I have a question. Do you notice anything funny about these images:
Yeah, I’m sure you spotted it: everyone is, well, human.
Real Life Only Better
See, the thing about the new Web site, as beautiful as it is, as compelling, as usable, as great as the dashboard might be: it may make the technology more human, but in so doing it makes it far less humanizing.
I don’t remember what the home page looked like when I first logged on to Second Life. I remember it was confusing. I remember orientation was awful, especially for someone used to games, and I couldn’t help wondering why everything looked so, well, crappy.
And maybe I’m getting nostalgic or something, but that was part of the appeal. It was like a puzzle to unlock and it was the kind of puzzle that only 1 in 5 ever solved (the rest just logged off and never came back) but the reward was the very chaos that is Second Life.
The other thing I remember in those first weeks of exploration wasn’t the world itself, but the people. And the people didn’t always LOOK like people. They looked like furries or kids or dragons or the Kool Aid man.
Now, Second Life has been cleaned up and repackaged and while I’m sure it’s well-intentioned – don’t scare someone off with photos of Gor or blue foxes….I also feel like Second Life 2.0 is setting itself up to establish a new cultural norm in which what is not possible in real life is waaaay less important than creating a version of real life instead – one that is shiny, and looks beautiful, and is filled with beautiful people, and which seems to focus on buying a house and dancing and definitely, definitely shopping.
Is this what we mean by humanizing technology – creating a new ideal for what it means to be virtually human which simply lifts off of all the beauty myths and commerce myths and….well….all the crap we have to put up with in real life?
Because on the one hand, it’s great that we can have alternate realities in which to explore and meet people and be creative. And on the other hand, if those alternative realities start to mimic the real world’s cultural norms then maybe we’re not actually learning anything new, we’re just relocating reality.
I wasn’t at SLCC, but it seemed to me that it wasn’t about all those icecream things you mentioned, but chalking up a building:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2009/08/further-on-woodbury-university-and-linden-lab-chalking.html
You can’t humanize technology when you don’t have humane people steeped in the humanities coding the world. That’s my conclusion. And of course, as always, open source = closed society.
Can SL become a brand? Oh, I dunno. It is and it isn’t. I don’t think anything is going to be swallowed in imminently or in 2 years in any way you say, but maybe the Code Cave knows something we don’t know if they’ve gone feral, as melponeme put it so aptly on my board.
I marvel at how the police blotter could get out offenses in record time about people being “abusive to support staff” but how it can take the Lab days — years — to address griefer groups at the root.
Imagine Intlibber getting away with making it seem like he puts griefer groups to good use — he’s a prevaricator and a decivilizer. Sure, chaingangs can build roads…
I think it’s really not about humanizing technology, Dusan. It’s about creating an interface in which we get to be *inside* technology, literally soaking in it, and get to see how inhuman it is, and how inhuman and uncivilized the coders are. And the job is to civilize them, the code, and the world. Truly it is.
Well, that’s definitely a different SLCC than I was at. I had heard about a ‘party bus’ but somehow, um, partying on a bus isn’t my thing, and there were all kinds of little ‘add-on events’ outside the main conference that I either missed or couldn’t find, I kept forgetting to check Twitter to see what people were doing.
I had seen the photo though of the ‘chalking’ and I said at an event in world that it was dreadful and I stand by that – I don’t care how it happened, what led to it, or whatever ‘fun’ it was supposed to be (what is this, kindergarten?) someone should have stopped defamation when they saw it.
I’m not sure I agree with you about coders. It’s a bit of a blanket statement. I have coders who work for me who are very humane with what I see as pretty decent sense of ‘right’.
Having said that, I think that the coders who claim that code is somehow morally neutral are typically the ones who scare me. It’s the same point as the Web site really – you can look at it and say it was a design issue: make it user friendly, attract more users, make registration easier.
And YET, the design is informed by moral choices about avatar representation, commerce and sexuality.
The same is true of code. And CERTAINLY code that is informed by the kinds of views espoused by Kurzweil leaves me frightened for our collective futures. He speaks of technology as an unstoppable force which, he says lightly, could lead to some really bad stuff, but you can’t stop progress (is his argument).
He may want to live forever, but with his knowledge I’d think he’d be far more concerned about the lack of a governing and moral compass for how this future of his unfurls.
And finally, I disagree that we see how INhuman it is to be inside Second Life – I think instead that we are able to be inside technology like we aren’t anywhere else, and while some of the code structure facilitates darkness, I also find that there are some pretty astonishing and positive things that can happen as well.
What I didn’t see was a roadmap. I saw lots of stuff that doesn’t constitute either a business roadmap or a technology roadmap, but nothing I’d expect in the conventional usage of the term.
@Tateru – they did not display an official roadmap, but listening to their speeches, it seemed to me that they likely did have such a list in their back pocket and they merely showed us a few tidbits from it. I got the impression they had grand plans for the future, and of course that would be a good thing.
But since there was nothing shown that they hadn’t already mumbled about sometime in the preceding months (all with the “may or may not even happen” disclaimer, anyway) I don’t actually feel any better informed — or have any better sense of the thing that a roadmap is supposed to provide: direction.
Dusan: This post totally cracked me up. Tidbits such as “Kurzweil who phoned in his keynote and then read from the dust jacket of his book…” tickled me pink.
And what is an ice cream headache? Is that Canadian for “brain freeze?”
But to the point that I most care about. Is Linden Lab moving far aawway from that which is Not Possible IRL? Hell yes. But guess what? What they do in that regard doesn’t matter anymore, because thousands of people in a lot of the right places DO care. Can you imagine Lewis PR calling up a media outlet to pitch NPIRL content? They wouldn’t know it if it hit them in the face, much less understand it enough to sell the concept. The dirty little secret is that most Lindens and their PR agency don’t grasp the Not Possible IRL aspect of Second Life.
For the most part, Lindens are not artists, nor do they understand art. The creative types have been shown the door. Today, LL is predominantly peopled with suits and geeks. But that’s okay! They will do their job and in doing so, enable us to do ours.
Awww Bettina – thanks, you made my brain freeze disappear – because you’re RIGHT….maybe we don’t need the Lab to understand.
I have to say….I show enterprise SL, and the Immersive Workspace meeting rooms, and the stage at Metanomics….and they’re GORGEOUS (of course!) but then I show them Eshi’s spider nest meeting room and they go WOW. So maybe all this packaging is just, hmmm, eye candy that preps them for the real meal.
@Tateru – you know, I really should be more careful with that term. What the Lab gave us was a general map of what they’re trying to do and how, some tools and tech that they may or may not launch…and that is NOT a road map. So I’m totally with you.
BTW – I’m willing to bet that mesh imports aren’t coming any time soon. “might be/some day/don’t know when if ever” is hardly a road map.
Media on a prim, I think they’ll do – it’s way too enterprise friendly.
“The dirty little secret is that most Lindens and their PR agency don’t grasp the Not Possible IRL aspect of Second Life.”
I wasn’t aware that Linden Lab was obligated to promote one particular idiosyncratic take on the aesthetics of Second Life over any other. Implying that they ought to by talk of “dirty little secrets” is only *tactically* different from some day old alt screaming about “serious business” and killing your chickens. It’s fascistic.
Verisimilitude isn’t the enemy of art; no, I have a far more likely candidate in mind.
Dusan, you certainly are an energetic cheerleader of SL. But I’m beginning to wonder lately if you’re unable to see the forest from the trees. Seems like many bloggers are trying to predict how grand SL will become in the next 2 years, how useful it will be for immersive meetings and training opportunities. Even how it might replace the web as we know it today. I enjoy SL myself, but really, there’s much more working against SL for wide-spread adoption to replace the web than going for it. The web as I understand, is a huge place to openly publish information, disseminate knowledge, and give publishers full management and control over their content. SL as I understand, is a small, closed environment where we go to socialize, shop, interact. The majority of information creation and dissemination within SL is about itself, not the rest of the world. In addition, as a content creator, I haven’t the ability to fully own the rights, distribution, and backup of any of this content within SL or host a SL-accessible sim within my own network.
I have reviewed a few RFP’s of late, asking for a virtual world build out. The overall theme is that companies are, no shocker here, looking to explore the opportunities for virtual classrooms and meeting spaces. While SL may be comparable to other VR offerings (yes, there are others) with regard to communication over voice and text, it falls way short of other platforms (such as OLIVE) with regard to native support of widely used business office document software, minimal firewall configurations, localized hosting, and a BIG one for business meetings, scheduling conference rooms and sending out notifications.
The humanizing of SL as you put it, in my opinion, only pushes it farther away from being a successful competitor to other VR platforms for business use or farther-fetched, replacing the current WWW. But I think LL sees a bigger reward coming from the world of immersive social interaction and game-like qualities rather than trying to replace the web’s fantastic ability to distribute information over thin clients, give content creators full control over their content, and run their choice of web server and content management system. SL as the new web paradigm, no thank you.
Coyle:
I’m not proposing that this is what Linden Lab should do or that they’ll achieve it. I’m very much a “on the one hand but on the other hand” kind of person – which means I’m terribly indecisive I suppose.
I believe the Lab is trying to be an alternate way to engage with content. I believe that they may very well be able to achieve developing a platform that is a parallel way to access content, built on the Net but independent from it.
Now, I don’t particularly think this is a great thing – if all we do is look at PowerPoints inside a virtual conference room then let’s just give up now. And surfing within a browser within a 3D world? Why not just, well, browse?
And clearly, as my last posts indicated, Linden Lab is trying to make a social media play, their new web site is all about ‘play’, engagement with other people, with a nod to content creation.
Finally – I’m with you on pitches to enterprise since that’s my work.
What I’m waiting for is to bypass virtual meetings (which is a losing proposition frankly) and get into ‘deep collaboration’, innovation and unlocking creativity. And then, moving into data visualization and proper modalities for immersive training.
Finally, my point about humanizing is that they’ve gone too far – all of these PEOPLE doing boring things, and sitting around conference tables – it’s starting to look like Vivaty or Sony Home. In other words, the same as the rest. Which is hardly a competitive position.
Posting almost entirely just to agree.
In trying to appeal to a larger audience, and a duller one (both because wealthier and more bought into the norms, and because the original small audience was heavy on the non-dull), they’re definitely showing us more conventional humans, and more conventional humans doing conventional things. (Not that shopping is bad, I love SL shopping. But sitting around a table in a sterile meeting room IS bad, zomg.)
And I also agree that in some sense it doesn’t really matter. We oddballs have discovered and fallen in love with the general idea, and we’re not leaving (unless for something even awesomer). I hope LL doesn’t sterilize and ruin SL, but if they do there’s Blue Mars, there’s OpenSim, there’s whatever else comes next. It would be a little harder to move en masse from SL to some nice OpenSim grid than it was to move en masse from Twitter to Plurk
but it would be doable if necessary.
And that said, I have a certain amount of faith that they won’t screw it up that way. They’re somewhat conflicted and inattentive and clueless at times, but I think they know where their differentiating UGC bread is buttered…
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