Assignment 9, Beth

There are definite drawbacks of using any collaborative technology for group work instead of face-to-face communication, for example, fewer cues to understand co-workers and a lack of shared sense of place or time. Second Life is a social technology that shares some of these obstacles, but attempts to combat them with new techniques. Professor McLeod mentioned several things that Second Life contributes to user collaboration, like creating a sense of shared place. Second Life provides a 3D virtual area with objects that all people can explore and experience together. The common location provides a psychological sense of common ground for users to develop context for further communication and collaboration.

One drawback when establishing common ground, however, is that although there is an official time (Pacific Time) and a time of day based on the darkness of the virtual sky, people who use Second Life are distributed in the real world and working in different local times. Users might be in a quiet cubicle at work or at home with their wild kids running around or anywhere. This lack of knowledge about each other’s surroundings and timing is an inevitable drawback of Second Life’s ability to bring many different people together to the same virtual space. Another struggle toward establishing common ground is that you need to use your mouse to create things as well as instant message your group mates, which limits collaboration efforts.

Further focus on the inhabitants of Second Life shows good qualities of the program’s feature that allows users to pick the way their avatar looks and acts. The ability to consciously create a virtual self allows some people to improve on their real life behaviors through “back-channeling”. This process occurs when people change their real personalities or practices based on what they learn through communication with their avatars in Second Life. Allowing people to create an “ideal” virtual self may help people behave ideally and work together well. A drawback in the freedom in creating a character is that people’s avatars may be so different from their real selves that it is difficult for others to figure them out and work with them efficiently.

Finally, Boellstorf (2008) discusses some technical issues or “breaks” in Second Life that can hinder collaborative work. Lags in the connection can lead to awkward pauses in conversation which may lead a user to think that the other does not care about answering them or may be busy with something more important. The concept of being “afk” or away from the keyboard shows that users give the benefit of the doubt in situations like these indicating a trust bias. Technical issues may put a damper on the speed of communication and increase doubts in some people’s minds, but other people continue collaborating through Second Life with trust in fellow users, making Second Life valuable to collaboration.