Second Life
Over the course of the quarter we have been exposed to the new phenomenon of Second Life. Second Life is a game that mimics reality. Users are able to choose an avatar and create their personality from the ground up. We’ve looked at the positive and negative impacts of Second Life over the quarter. Here is my diary, charting my experiences (good and bad) in Second Life. |
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To be completely honest, I was not looking forward to exploring second life, and I really don’t think that after my exploration I became any more found of it. I was getting ready to go to the lab to get going on exploring, and my roommate asked where I was going, and it was somewhat difficult to explain the concept of second life. She said to me, “well, in real life, we’re going to get some sushi, you should come.” I think this may have started off my bad taste for second life, because the whole time in the lab I was sitting there thinking, “man, I could be having sushi with my friends right now.” Anyways, after I got over the fact that I was sitting in front of a computer pretending to walk around, I started to change my appearance. It’s crazy how many options they give you to manipulate your appearance. It actually made me laugh out loud when I realized that you can change things like neck length? Really? Developing the avatar reminded me of creating a profile in things like facebook or myspace. In creating a profile, one can choose to include or not include many different aspects of their personality. The accuracy that one is represented in these online communities is completely up to them. When I participate in myspace or facebook, I usually try to portray myself as accurately as possible, so I decided to go a different way when creating my avatar. I decided to make myself a male, for one. The ability to create and act as someone totally different was made really easy in Second Life. It’s an interesting mix though, because just like in online communities like facbook and myspace, second life can also be relatively ‘real’. Though there are places like the 80’s village that are much more fictitious and fantasy based, there are also replications of real places. |
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I explored the crazy and imaginary places to begin with because the seemed more interesting. But as I continued to search around these places, I became curious about Santa Clara University, as I’ve been hearing things in my classes about how SCU recently bought an island on Second Life. Before I reflect on my experiences at the SCU in second life, I’d like to talk about the idea that SCU spent good money to buy a virtual island. I think this is a very weird concept, and I’m not sure if I support the school spending our tuition money on this virtual island. I feel like there are many problems and glitches in the system that the money might have been better spent on. It perpetuates the idea that if life isn’t good enough, you can just go online and make it exactly what you want it to be. Either way, I went to the island, and it’s was crazy how similar it is to the actual university. With my preconceived notion that the premise of a virtual island of SCU was silly, I began to look around. What I found was surprising, and actually changed my opinion about the ridiculous idea to purchase a virtual island. When I heard that Santa Clara was on Second Life, I’d never really been on the program before. I figured it’d just look like the campus and be a place were nerds would meet on a Friday night to chat, or for high school kids to go to pretend to be in college and talk to boys. But what I found was that for example, in the museum, there are actual pictures of the actual exhibits talking place. There was information about the artist, as well as some interactive components. I think I found this aspect refreshing because it shows a bit of the real life being accurately and positively reflected in Second Life. I did find it interesting though, many of the times that I was at Santa Clara island, there weren’t many people around. It would have been interesting to chat with someone else that goes to Santa Clara about what else is available at the virtual school. After I explored Santa Clara island for a while I decided to check out something more fun. I teleported to Dance Island, and there were many more people there. I was shocked at some of the language and things that the people were talking about. They were talking about sexual positions and how nice one of the avatars ass is. I was thinking, this is ridiculous, it’s a computer screen. And maybe it’s the mothering quality in me but the next thing I though of is that young kids are on Second Life, and if I ( a communication major and young adult) am completely unaware of the happenings in Second Life, there’s no way a parent would be knowledgeable enough to screen the places that their kids goes on Second Life. |
After this experience I decided to get out of Second Life for a while. ….. |
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