I was a novice. She—if she really were a she—was an expert. In a computer-generated world called Second Life, the bodies that defined me as the interviewer and her as the interviewee (our avatars) sat in a lounge rendered on my computer screen at my desk in New York City, and on her computer, wherever she was. Second Life looks like a video game but isn’t. It’s more of a meeting place, a hangout, some would say an alternative reality. I had used my mouse and keyboard to walk my avatar to the lounge where we sat. We were chatting. I typed questions. She typed answers. My virtual body had bronze skin the color of a fake tan. My jeans were the same virtual ones I got when I first logged on to the world in 2004. My leather jacket was a hand-me-down from a virtual U2 cover band I’d written about. My hair was brown and spiky, a Second Life default setting. I sat down and stood up like a stiff. And when I typed in real life, my avatar raised his forearms and hands as if to an imaginary keyboard, and wiggled his fingers.
Pixeleen Mistral, red-haired and stylish in a black jacket and miniskirt, sat with her legs crossed. I didn’t even know how to cross my legs. When she typed to me, her avatar remained seated and suave. “I got an animation override,” she told me when I acknowledged the obvious fact that I was a foreigner in her land. “Most girls get them so they don’t walk like complete dorks.” She pointed out another sign of her form-fitting comfort in this world: her boots. Second Life is streamed to the computers of the thousands of people who “live” and work there, or just visit,...
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Everyone knows that there are real people behind the avatars, and the use of alts (alternate accounts) and avatars that bear no relation to the real person opens up any resident or journalist to deception.
This potential for deception (benign or malicious) is something that Second Life residents simply grow to understand.
Until recently I syndicated my advice column (http://www.heartunbreaker.com) through the Second Life Herald, and I continue to write it... and I am certain that some of the questions I get are simply made up. Some I am positive are completely real. There's a huge grey area, and I try to answer each with the understanding that true or not the question or scenario has some legitimacy.
For Second Life, reality is as mutable as ones avatars appearance. But under the veneer is a real person with real ambitions, problems and conflicts.
Posted by Heartun Breaker
on Thu 2 Aug 2007 at 01:22 AM
There are two profoundly influential factors on real-life and Second-Life journalism you did not mention: 1) censorship and banning of undesirable commentators and 2) corporate sponsorship of blogs and press. For example, Hamlet Au is sponsored by Millions of Us, founded by former Linden employee Reuben Steiger and Mark Wallace's blog 3pointD.com is sponsored by Electric Sheep Company, also close to Linden Lab. The Herald has a variety of sponsors including Anshe Chung Studios. The influence that pro-Linden corporations have may be subtle, but given their financial interest in a positive take on SL, they can work extra hard to counter the criticism that comes from outsiders like the Los Angeles Times, Valleywag, or Clay Shirkey.
The Herald itself recently moved to forcing all writers to clear their copy through Pixeleen Mistral rather than allowing some to keep their previously free posting privileges on par with the editors and publishers precisely because some of the subjects of the unsavoury side of SL began to threaten them with (specious) libel suits and takedown notices to their blog hosting service. This fear of the vulnerable critical SL media is a fear that RL media, with its experience in defending reporters and the First Amendment, and with seasoned lawyers and deeper pockets to fend off lawsuits, rarely has to take seriously.
The controlling of speech in and around Second Life is phenomenal, precisely because very serious corporate interests are at stake; it's owned by one company and a network of technically independent companies still dependent on LL for their platform were spawned by it and are fiercely loyal. That's a context that every reporter has to be mindful of, and report on as part of the SL story.
If, within this controlled context, Hamlet Au was able to report on something like the "prim tax revolt" you have to dig deeper even than the already deep-digging you're doing. The prim tax revolt -- one of the hagiographical stories of Linden-approved SL history -- was already anticipated company policy by the time Au was blogging on it; one of the leaders of the revolt went on to become a Linden employee; the Lindens themselves had come to hate their own prim tax because it rewarded prim-hoarders and harmed artists and forced them to leave. The prim tax revolt wasn't against Linden Lab, which quickly retired the police; it was against the player class who supported the tax because they themselves as large land-owners benefitted from it.
Anonymous avatars like Pixeleen Mistral can reap all the rewards of anonymity precisely because others at the Herald like Peter Ludlow, or myself, when I posted there, took the heat for the articles in the form of sometimes really horrid and nasty personal attacks based on dredging up details from our real lives by those playing "Internet psychologist". The fire and ire against the Herald tends to fall on those who have revealed real-life names and had them forcibly revealed by the Herald itself; those without that connection can blissfully go on playing their avatar role-play secure in the knowledge that no one will ever harass them for having an avatar opposite of their RL gender; or having children that angry posters ridiculously claim are being ignored and starved each time a reporter undertakes defense of their story in critical posts -- and all the rest of the nasty repertoire of typical blog commentary that the CJR itself avoids (unlike the Herald!) by having a very strict posting policy.
The anonymous avatars of Second Life who stand by their anonymity could do so with far more credibility if they did not rely so heavily on those of us who do not make our avatars anonymously, and have been willing to talk to the press and link our RL names. We've had to take incredible heat for Second Life that they are spared. Their call to create an insular, private walled garden where everyone can be perceived only for the content of their character instead of any RL identifying trait like race or class is a noble one; it depends on others constantly suffering harassment for speaking out with RL names for them to maintain their fictions.
Posted by Prokofy Neva
on Sat 4 Aug 2007 at 03:06 PM