Reporting on the puppet without observing the person pulling the strings can seem like a willful dismissal of an important part of a story, an invitation to be duped. To the extent that what happens in Second Life has real-world consequences—such as comments by a faculty member about an all-too-real shooting at his school, or the opportunities to make real money—it seems risky, and potentially irresponsible, to dismiss the broadly agreed-upon journalistic convention of verification. The counter-argument I heard from Second Life journalists is that in real life, many articles do not describe what their flesh-and-blood subjects do when they are not in the mode that made them a topic for, or character in, a story. (In this article, for instance, do we not have an understanding of who Au is without knowing what he’s like when he’s eating dinner at home or on vacation with family?)
Peter Ludlow maintains that people role-play and use avatars in real life, anyway, that there are masks on us all. “If I get in front of class, I’m in a sense presenting an avatar,” he says. “I dress a certain way and I present myself in a certain way.” This happens in real-life reporting, too. “I think it’s probably the case when Christiane Amanpour is in front of the camera she’s probably presenting a different side of herself than when she’s, I don’t know, chilling out at the bar.”
And in fairness, Au and the others tend to write about people’s lives in Second Life, rather than their lives outside it. (Au told me that in writing his forthcoming book about Second Life, he had to fact-check one of the vets he wrote about, and the story held up.) Second Life reporters ignore the artificiality of the artifice on their computer screens. Without noting their subjects’ real-life names, they confidently report on residents who are at war with each other, on residents who have flooded an area with virtual water to make a statement about global warming, on residents who have built virtual pot plants, and so many other activities that just seem interesting on their own merits. This is a new society forming here in Second Life, they argue. Can’t incoming reporters just focus on what’s being done in this new world?
No one I met in Second Life challenged my own reluctance to ignore the real world and unquestioningly accept the virtual one more than Pixeleen Mistral, the reporter with the server-crashing boots. I’m not the first person she has vexed. A year ago, when Mistral sought work at the Herald, Mark Wallace interviewed her for the job. He preferred to pay Herald reporters in U.S. dollars transferred to them online. For that to happen, Mistral would have to surrender some real information about herself. She asked to be paid in Linden dollars instead. She would convert them into real money herself. Wallace balked. Mistral started reporting—and reporting well—for the Herald anyway, for free. Wallace relented. Mistral got her Linden bucks, and Wallace never found out who was behind the avatar. These days, Wallace says he doesn’t mind. Her virtual self is real enough. She gets the job done.
Which is Mistral’s point, exactly. “You RL journalists always want to get RL verification, but if this is its own world, in-world verification here is what matters,” she typed to me when we met virtual face to virtual face in the Herald’s Second Life office. “The people reporting from the outside miss most of the nuance and assume that recreating RL in SL is a good thing.”
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