I’d never heard of second life before I took this class, so I’ll admit that I don;t know much about it, but the more I learn about it the more I find my self saying “wait just a second.” It seems a little off to me. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the concept of giving up real life to enter a make believe life.
I can see the entertainment value of it. I understand how it might be fun to create a character and walk it around a virtual world, but I don’t know that replacing real life with that virtual world is unnecessarily a good thing. We talked about people who are dissatisfied with the outcomes of their real lives so they create the life they had hoped to live on second life. We read about the therapeutic potential of this. But it seems to me that there is a potential need for therapy for people who stop accepting and living in reality.
One of the other things that bothered me about Secondlife was mass buying and selling of “goods.” One of my previous blogs expressed my feelings towards buying nothing with good money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being earned by people who have only created a virtual image and who don’t have to purchase and manipulate raw goods. When a secondlife avatar buys a new pair of shoes, a real credit card number is charged and a real bill comes in the mail, but no real shoes are ever created or tried on by the person who pays for them. It seems like it is based around making money and the real purpose of second life is for capital gain.
The potential for deviance also bothers me. One of the videos we watched in class show a man dressed a woman preforming a pole dance. This demonstrates the freedom that people have to act out deviance. The fact that there is a msot wanted list and a need for policemen in secondlife make the virtual world seem a little less Utopian.
Secondlife seems a little sketchy to me and I propose that people should give it a second thought before diving in.
