Assignment Nine - Second Life (Katie Dreier)

The Second Life article defines Second Life as “simulating abstractions of reality … they may be operated as a service; creating them may be an art; people may visit them to play games. Ultimately, though, they’re just a set of locations. Places” (Boellstorff 91). Based on this description, I would not be inclined to assume that Second Life would work well for collaboration. The beginning of the paper focuses solely on the definition of place and location and describes zoning issues and the ability to fly, among other things, in Second Life. It seems that this virtual world only nominally acts as a ‘second life’ as there seems to be a scarcity of actual-world theories and privacy.

I am not personally familiar with Second Life but according to the article, it seems any collaborative capabilities the virtual world provides are effectively unconventional. Our class discussions tend to consider aspects such as privacy, collocation, and grouding, etc., as they relate to video streams and file sharing, for example. When I think of technological collaboration, I think of working on a certain assignment with peers. It seems Second Life collaboration focuses mainly on the capability of putting people in the same place, at the same time, face to face. This is an interesting concept as it allows users to be together no matter where in the world they are. I’m still not sure as to the benefits this provides over video conferencing though, for example. I think for many many distributed people this form of meeting is most conducive as it doesn’t require as much bandwidth as video conferencing would for a large amount of people. Although these virtual worlds seem like a great tool to connect users, I’m still not convinced that they are more conducive to collaboration if users cannot share and edit files together.