Social Media

If you’ve been exposed to any of the recent media hype surrounding Second Life you may have come to the conclusion that Linden Lab’s virtual world is some kind of unstoppable force. Second Life membership has accelerated to nearly half-million new signups per month, Linden founder Philip Rosedale seems to be everywhere at once (although it may just be his Avatar), and SL-celebrity Anshe Chung has practically become a household name (at least for readers of Business Week). With so much momentum and positive press what could possibly go wrong?

Oh, I don’t know, maybe something like a Federal investigation into online gambling in virtual casinos.

Of all of the vices that can be found in the Metaverse some translate better than others. Virtual drugs don’t work particularly well — unless you count Second Life as a drug. Virtual prostitution, as creepy as it seems, apparently works for a few people who can get past the possibility that their virtual date might actually be a construction worker in Peoria. Virtual gambling, on the other hand, is a prefect match for Second Life. Online gambling is already a well established industry, and for many, the added social element of a virtual reality world is apparently a big improvement over watching 2-D cards being dealt onto a flat green poker table.

[Read more…] about Second Life Vice: Linden Lab Is in Denial About Its Gambling Problem

I’m wrong. A lot.

I fully admit it. I’m not an especially deep thinker, and I can’t predict the future for shit. Like everyone else, I was hoping for flying cars by now. Not to mention robots, though I suppose the longer we have to wait on that one, the better.

Hell, when I first heard about text-messaging, I scoffed. Scoffed, I tell you! I even remember whennish and whereabouts I was: walking down the Embarcadero in 2000 with my supervisor at CNET, a fellow who was much more on top of cutting-edge technology than myself. He was telling me about something called text-messaging, which was either just introduced in America or was about to be, but was all the rage overseas. I was five stubborn years away from even considering a cell phone, and text-messaging sounded like the most impractical thing ever. Words on a cell phone screen? And typing them via the number pad? Puh-leeze. As if.

[Read more…] about Second Life and the Vision Thing

According to the “Anshe Chung is a millionaire and you aren’t” press release, Ailin Graef was born and raised in Hubei, China, but is currently a citizen of Germany. Please make a note of that fact, as it will be on the quiz.

The story so far: sex sells, and nothing sells like sex. It’s the oldest profession in our world, and the the most popular in Second Life. The preponderance of sex workers is one of the few things about Second Life that genuinely makes sense to me, once I wrap my brain around the fact that people consider sitting at their computers and wanking and/or typing dirty while making their avatars do quasi-erotic calisthenics qualifies as sexy. It feels like cheating to me—if you’re going to do, do it for real—but that’s just my own disconnect between meatspace and polygon-based environments. When I make the leap of faith, then sure, yes, absolutely. If it’s a make-believe world in which you can do whatever you want, and you’ve harbored fantasies of whoring, then why not? It certainly results in some entertaining debates, as the self-appointed protectors of Biblical morality desperately wag their fingers in disapproval. Are certain types of sex immoral, as has been suggested? To paraphrase Woody Allen: yes, if you’re doing it right.

[Read more…] about Second Life and the Stupid White Man’s Burden, Part Three: Guni’s Condescension

To say that I spend every waking moment online would be inaccurate. Sure, I’m online whether at work or at home, with the same screen configuration at both: Gmail window in the upper left corner of the screen, minimized but visible enough to see if there’s a new email or chat request, SecureCRT in the bottom left, just enough showing to see if there’s a new message. That’s also how my laptop looks when I’m at a wifi cafe writing, which is how I spend most of my quote-free-unquote time these days. But it isn’t just the waking moments, because even when I’m asleep, I’m still downloading stuff. Someone was kind enough to post the Bob Dylan Hybrid SACD box set in .flac format to alt.binaries.sounds.lossless, and it’s taking a while to get ’em all, as you can well imagine. Thank goodness for DVD-R.

So I’m online in one form or another at any given moment, and when actually in front of a computer usually have a chat or three happening. Oh, right—my cellphone is usually somewhere within my field of vision, lest I get a call or (even more importantly) a text message and miss it. For all of that, I don’t interact much with strangers, and I classify a stranger as someone I’ve never met in meatspace. I don’t participate in online forums or message boards even what few mailing lists still exist, and unless it’s a means to a specific end (like an offer of a gig, which usually comes via email), I almost never correspond or chat with anyone I don’t know in real life. What I do online is all about supplementing my offline life. (And, of course, piracy. Arrrr!)
[Read more…] about Second Life and the Stupid White Man’s Burden, Part Two: Grief’s Interjection