One of the most important aspects of Second Life, that both Professor McLeod and ethnographer Boellstorff addressed, is the salience of place. Though presented on a 2D screen, the 3D rendering of Second Life's landscape creates the experience of inhabiting and navigating an environment. Boellstorff states in "Coming of Age in Second Life" that it is both the "central role of vision in Second Life" and the "simultaneous presence of more than one person" that make Second Life a place for its users (92).
Because of its 3D environment, Second Life itself is a great collaborative environment for in-world work. For example, McLeod demonstrated to us the process of building digital objects out of "prims", the basic building blocks of creation. Prims are central to Second Life's commodity economy based on creationist capitalism (Boellstorff, 101). A user's worth depends on his production and acquiring of user-created objects. Thus, collaborative in-world building is ideal work for Second Life. As a virtual reality, SL provides rich workspace awareness. Everyone can occupy the same virtual place, view the same object, and see one another. Their virtual copresence provides them with grounding, allowing them to refer to their virtual work without confusion. Thus, Second Life could be applied to any work involving 3D models. Architectural building models or molecular models could be built in Second Life for the benefit of group editing and learning.
However, for outside work, Second Life holds very few virtues. It is only valuable when the object to be manipulated is in-world and taking advantage of Second Life's 3D properties. For other kinds of work, such as document writing or even simple discussion, Second Life can hinder rather than facilitate. Because of lag, a complicated interface, and possibly distracting avatars, Second Life would be less useful than an IM chat program which provides the same basic functionality. Second Life doesn't provide any easy way of bringing in outside work, such as document files or picture files, as is important for shared-display collaboration.
One thing I do see Second Life being useful for is establishing a relationship of trust between distributed collaborators. As we learned early on in the course, collaborators like to meet FtF at least once, just to get to know one another. In situations where collaborators cannot meet in real life, Second Life, with its many outlets for identity creation (avatar name, physique, outift), provides an opportunity to socialize and learn about one another in a more intimate way than standard communication technologies.
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Is Second Life really a more "intimate" way to get to know somebody than through, say phone or chat? In a way, I feel like there is way more identity to *present* so that people feel more compelled to lie about they way they look or the things they do and there is no enforcement of truth. Take MySpace versus Facebook--which site's profiles would you trust more? It's harder to manipulate Facebook's facts, such as email and networks, so people are less likely to lie and therefore trust established more absolutely.
ReplyDeleteI would agree that Second Life is useful for collaborating on visual pieces of work, such as designing a new couch or building. The environment lets each of the users see what the other is building, and although only one person can control the design, everyone can offer their own suggestions for improvement. The other side to this, however, is that it may be difficult to teach others to use these tools and develop common ground. When we attempted to do this in class, it seemed like it would have been more difficult for users to learn without verbal communication.
ReplyDeleteI think that Second Life could be very useful as a FtF virtual meeting tool is it was changed a little bit. If instead of being a game, it would have a business feel, a way of training people who are working remotely, but can still collaborate with other employees. Maybe call it, Second Life - The Corporate Edition, where people could solve issues and cases relevant to their jobs and company.
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