Assignment 9 - Second Life - Jesse Miner

Second Life can be beneficial in a variety of scenarios. The fact that it exists on computers makes it well suited to displaying electronic media such as slideshows and videos. Thus, it works well as a venue for presentations or meetings that involve those media, especially when the participants are geographically distributed. As Professor McLeod emphasized, SL is a three dimensional virtual world. This makes it an excellent setting for collaborative building tasks such as the one demonstrated in lecture. Whether you're building a simple chair or an entire house, you can see your progress at any moment. When multiple people are working together to build the same object, SL affords workspace awareness because you can see where everyone's avatar is and what they are working on. This is highly preferable to performing the same task with text or voice as the only means of communication.

Second Life is not good for everything, though. People often refer to "playing" SL as if it were World of Warcraft. They are both virtual worlds, but they have very different purposes. Social norms have developed in Second Life that are close to real life social norms. For example, the beginning of Boellstorff's article describes a conflict between "Zazzy's" and "Joanie's," two businesses that differ radically in appearance. Zazzy's is "a black building with brightly colored windows," while Joanie's is "a streamlined metal-and-wood structure with modern furniture." People were protesting against Zazzy for building his "glowing monstrosity" right next to Joanie's (which was there first). The lesson here is that one cannot do whatever he or she pleases in Second Life. Zazzy infringed on Joanie's virtual space and now he's facing the consequences.