Shirky had a right to be skeptical. Log on to Second Life today, when the official resident number exceeds five million, and the population of people actually in the world at any given time is only about 20,000 to 30,000. Rosedale estimates that there are about 180,000 unique users of Second Life each day, and says that of the five-million-plus people who log on at some point, only about 10 percent return after one month.
Reporting about this world for MTV News, I wasn’t susceptible to the numbers hype. Our young TV audience and Web readership don’t need dazzling statistics to sell them on the relevance of online worlds. But what I was susceptible to was corporate-driven novelty. For every homegrown Second Life tribute band that I discovered, I was pitched pieces on banks or brands coming to the virtual world. But after doing stories on American Apparel and Universal Music’s exhibition space, I decided that was enough. Some of this corporate innovation/invasion had no more novelty than the dairy industry’s creation in the late 1990s of an official Web site for milk.
I’m not the only one for whom 2006 was the year to get both excited and jaded about media attention to the influx of companies coming to Second Life. Listen to Philip Rosedale: “Is it totally irrelevant that big brands are in Second Life? No. It’s a sea change. They weren’t around a year ago and now they’re here. That tells us something. It especially tells us something because I didn’t do those deals. We don’t do any deals. We didn’t ask them to come. Personally, I wish people would write more about education [several universities offer classes in Second Life]. I really wish that people would write more about the life-changing stuff going on, write more about that oppression support group that meets on this island every couple of days and sits on prayer cushions and talks about themselves. That’s a big deal. Do I wish people would just write about that? Sure. But I also wish everybody would read every night.”
But the criticism of this second-wave journalism’s treatment of Second Life is more fundamental than just hype and factual disputes. Au believes that journalists who come into the virtual world thinking the hot story is how the real world is planting a footprint here miss stories that are just as good, maybe even better, but don’t hinge on a connection between the real and the virtual. He’s one of several influential Second Life reporters who think that the real-life media’s obsession with the “real” dismisses the importance of what is happening wholly on a virtual plane. “People go here to create an alternate identity that a lot of times will be totally different than who they are in real life,” he says. Respect that spirit and embrace it, is his philosophy. So Au typically doesn’t even ask the people he interviews in-world to give him their real names. It’s the best way he knows to capture what is going in the world.
Au’s attitude invites an immediate howl from us real-world reporters. Doesn’t the full truth matter, even in a place where so many real-world conventions are irrelevant? On April 17, I wrote a story for MTV News about a Second Life memorial for the previous day’s shootings at Virginia Tech. The piece was potent because the resident I met at the memorial was a teacher at the university. He said he’d been on campus that awful Monday. Au has interviewed residents who claim to be veterans of America’s current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If our interviewees are lying to us, we’re in trouble. I fact-checked the teacher by getting his real name and confirming his status with Virginia Tech. Au has mostly relied on instinct to confirm the veracity of what his sources say about their real life.
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