In a second phase that began about a year ago, a new wave of reporters, representing big media outlets and with a somewhat different agenda from the pioneers, came in. They shined a spotlight, asked for real names, and were generally more interested in the phenomenon of Second Life—in the wow factor and the growing number of ways it mimicked real life—rather than the liberating possibilities of building a world from scratch. In October 2006, this new wave of media attention helped draw Second Life its one-millionth new virtual resident—even though the actual import of that is a matter of some debate—then its second, third, fourth, and fifth-millionth, all by the end of February. To the reporters who were there at the start, this new wave wasn’t exactly welcome, and the clash of journalistic styles raises interesting questions about why we do what we do, and about what’s important—journalistically—in a place that isn’t quite real, but where what happens can have real-world consequences.
I’ve reported in this other world during both phases. This spring I spoke with many of the Second Life reporters who have worked the hardest to define journalism in their virtual land. I’ve been told, as I think about Second Life and what is happening here, not to get distracted by the wrong weirdness. I’ve been told why real names don’t matter here and why understanding someone’s virtual self does. I’ve been told to think clearly about a place where the government is also the god, the maker of the land upon which we walk, and a private company. I’ve been told not to witness the virtual beat through eyes that see a proliferation of obscuring masks, but those that see an abundance of revealing truths about how people might live if they got a chance to start over. I’ve been told this in a place where you can fly to a story with the flap of your butterfly wings, and I’ve been told that’s a liberating thing.
Beyond the journalists who have set out to cover this virtual world as a beat, Second Life has been “explained” in dozens of articles. It was a 2006 cover story in Business Week and has been featured in at least eight stories in The New York Times and dozens more in other major papers. Second Life has been profiled on CBS’s Sunday Morning and serves as an occasional host location for NPR’s The Infinite Mind. This little, virtual place gets a lot of shine. I’ll take some of the blame for that—and it is blame I hear in the rising backlash against this world from reporters who cover it and virtual world-watchers who think it’s all a bit much. I wrote the first of those Times stories and I’ve covered Second Life online and on air for MTV News, where I write about video games. But Second Life isn’t a game. It just looks like one because, like the worlds of Grand Theft Auto or Super Mario 64, it’s a digital place rendered on a screen. The ways Second Life differs from a game are what propel all this interest.
Launched in 2003, Second Life is the product of Linden Lab, a San Francisco company, and its blond, wide-eyed CEO, Philip Rosedale, a former chief technical officer at RealNetworks who as a teenager tried to build a hovercraft powered by lawnmower blades. He never saw Second Life as a game, but as an extension of real life (“RL” in Second Life parlance). “We were trying to create a living space that you could just go into and it would be real,” he told me recently. His new world would provide people who communicated through the Internet with something more vivid than an e-mail address or chat-room nickname: a virtual body. A new user of Second Life would customize an avatar, and maybe what you created as a representation of your RL self would say something about who you are—or who you want to be.
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