The fascinating social phenomenon of Second Life is a technology that has tried to capture and mimic elements of “real life” while enhancing user abilities that would be unavailable in real life. I imagine that general idea behind Second Life was to make it into a large virtual community of users within an environment parallel to real life communities.
Being a highly visual virtual environment, Second Life would naturally be advantageous as a medium for highly visual types of collaboration. For example, architects can build and render models and share them amongst themselves in a “three-dimensional visuality” to show details and features unavailable or difficult to capture in two-dimensional pictures or text (Boellstorff, 92). This could be enhanced by the notion of “place and landscape” that Second Life provides, where a building could be better assessed within an accurate context and therefore all members of a collaboration team could understand this context more fully.
There are also many aspects of Second Life that would not be conducive to collaboration efforts. Firstly, the availability of “place” within SL is largely dependent upon users owning and building “property,” which requires a reasonable amount of money (Boellstorff, 99). It would be difficult to create an environment on Second Life, without owning property, which afforded the necessary amenities for face-to-face interaction, for example a private, relatively sound proof room with a whiteboard and table. SL “sandboxes,” though it gives users the ability to build without ownership, is not ideal for lengthy or private collaborations, as they are visible publicly and its contents deleted periodically.
Secondly, the customizability of Second Life naturally improves anonymity, as most users do not know each other’s true identities. This would greatly reduce the amount of trust that collaboration members instill within each other as opposed to, say, face-to-face meetings or even video conferencing, where a certain set of facial and physical cues are familiar and active. Second Life avatars, on the other hand, are too controlled and would not give users the sense that they are really “getting to know” somebody, but rather only an aspect or form of personality that the opposing user wishes to disclose. Without trust, as it has been shown in lecture, a large degree of effective and synergistic collaboration is lost amongst members.
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The potential for virtual worlds is definitely there and I agree with you that the visual qualities of a virtual world can support many different forms of visual collaboration. However in its current state there are a lot of limitations especially in user input that would cause users to use other collaborative technologies or Ftf meetings before they use Second Life. I think once a more immersive form of input in which hand and body motions translate one to one would be a first step. This would also help the issue you bring up with avatars being too controlled but would drastically reduce the anonymity of users.
ReplyDeleteIt is true that the capability of deception is high when using Second Life. Some would argue that concerning conventional and assessment signals though that this is somewhat 'harder to fake.' Would you propose deception is easier in Second Life than in other forms of technological collaboration? I think it exists every where and Second Life is not the only place where we can't completely discern someone's true identity.
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