The meaning of Life

Posted on 3 Oct 2007 at 17:12

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Gallery

...Second Life, that is. Aleks Krotoski explains how user-generated content is driving the growth of the virtual world, and provides some tips on how to get involved

Inside your computer lies the gateway to a brand-new world of community and collaboration. It's a training ground for public diplomacy, a template for education and a haven for vice. To get there, all you will have to do is become a citizen of the nation of Second Life.

Second Life is the most well known of a new genre of virtual worlds. These self-contained internet environments offer their residents a 'consensual hallucination' predicted by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. While virtual worlds of the past were populated by the techno-elite, wearing costumes of orcs and goblins, the new breed of social virtual worlds - such as Second Life, There and Habbo Hotel - have captured the fancies of a much wider range of computer users.

These environments exhibit the graphical qualities of games and the communication techniques of chatrooms while exploring new ways to display, consume and maintain information. The power is in the hands of the people; Second Life is a virtual world entirely created, sustained and owned by its users, known as residents. An ethical code of respect for others is the only limitation to what is permitted and what is possible.

Life on the line

Developed by Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based start-up run by programming-wonderchild Philip Rosedale and his talented colleagues, Second Life was released to the public in 2003. Since then, its meteoric rise has fed thousands of headlines, both positive and negative. It has also landed Rosedale in Time magazine's top 100 most influential people of 2007. Roo Reynolds, so-called 'metaverse evangelist' at IBM, believes Rosedale and Second Life are part of the Web 2.0 zeitgeist.

"The rise of Web 2.0 has seen the web become not just more interavailable, but more social," he explains. "Whether it's on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, personal blogs or Second Life, I've noticed that I've developed rich relationships by investing time in getting to know my friends and colleagues wherever they hang out online."

Indeed, Linden Lab believes Second Life is the social web in 3D. Eventually, it could transpose the vast libraries of information on the internet from static, two-dimensional, impersonal websites into fully interactive graphical environments navigable by embodied personas, called avatars, wandering together through streets of data. The experience isn't too far-fetched; it feels like taking a stroll through the suburbs and high streets of any modern town, and makes the web inherently social.

Around the clock

Unlike some other Web 2.0 facilities, the Second Life experience doesn't disappear when residents log out. The buildings and objects created by its eight million residents persist in the virtual ether for other people to discover, interact with and manipulate. So a Second Life library doesn't shut its doors when its owner is called for real-life tea; like a website, anyone can wander among the bookshelves, sit on the sofas and chat with other visitors at any time of the day or night. They can shop in any of the thousands of Second Life boutiques to create their virtual identities, buying clothes, shoes, hairstyles and other accoutrements with their Linden dollars, a currency that currently has a US dollar exchange rate of L$1 to US$0.03.

World of difference