Assignment #9: Daniela Retelny

Second Life is an online virtual world that has changed the way groups, particularly businesses and academic institutions collaborate. Second Life has dozens of important features; some are too wide in scope for a short blog assignment. Therefore, I am going to focus on the idea of simultaneous presence of more than one person on Second Life. Both the chapter of “Coming of Age in Second Life Place and Time” and Professor McLeod discussed the importance as well as the benefits and drawbacks of the concept of simultaneous presence of people in Second Life.

Second Life would work well for a big company such as IBM who needs an efficient system for its 350,000 employees to collaborate. IBM already depends on Second Life for a lot of their global corporate communication. When a company has so many employees it is very difficult to talk to all of them at the same time and keep them all updated and informed. Therefore, IBM hosts dozens of yearly corporate meetings, presentations and social events on Second Life.

There are several incentives and benefits for a company such as IBM to use Second Life. The company benefits financially while the employee’s benefit socially. Second Life has the potential to provide an enormous Return of Investment to companies. Rather than having their employees travel from all around the world to attend meetings, they can simply log onto the company’s Second Life world. This saves companies hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in travel costs. In addition, Second Life makes it easy for multiple people to collaborate at the same time rather than having to wait for each person to individually voice their thoughts.

Although Second Life has many perks, there are several drawbacks to it as well. Second Life would be lacking in times when people need to speak Face to Face. In addition, if deception is a concern then Second Life may not be the best collaboration system. For example, a task like a job interview would be very difficult to do on Second Life. Users can have someone else pretend to be them or lookup all the information they need during the interview. In addition, users can make multiple accounts and misrepresent themselves to others. Lastly, communicating via technology and the Internet always has the risk of technological problems and difficulty to learn and understand. If there is a glitch in any of the computer systems or people are unsure of how to use Second Life, there is a high chance of problems occurring. Professor McLeod showed us the set of commands that make up the “SL lingo.” I can easily imagine a lot of people getting confused with this language, causing them to make mistakes.