Second Life as a Platform for Virtual Meetings and Distance Learning Programs

Setting up my avatar, pictured above, was easy — you start by picking from a dozen ‘stock’ avatars. But it doesn’t take long to learn that you can no more keep the appearance you first entered Second Life with than you can keep the appearance you first entered real life with. It just isn’t done. You have to reinvent yourself, change your body, your skin, your hair, your clothes, learn some new moves.

Second Life is very much like real life — but not for the reasons you might imagine. It’s like real life in these ways:

• There are clear codes of conduct that vary by culture, and these codes are mostly unwritten, and must be learned.
• Unless you’re a master at computer scripts, you’re pretty helpless when it comes to making anything for yourself. You have to buy everything from others, or pick it up from the popular ‘free’ malls in Second Life.
• It’s a fun place to hang out with friends and people you know.
• It’s really lonely if you hang out there alone. There are a lot of lonely people wandering through Second Life.
• Many of the people you meet are trying to sell you something, including sex.
• It’s a complex social environment. There is more going on than you can ever know. Life there is unpredictable.
• Most people judge most other people by appearance and first impression.
• Most people are very serious, and quite a few seem quite desperate. Even the dance floors seem rather joyless places.
• There are a lot of ego games being played. It is, despite appearances, a fiercely competitive place. This is entirely unnecessary but it is so. We may adopt new personas with our avatars, but we bring our neuroses and other emotional baggage with us.
• When someone turns on their mike and speaks with their ‘real’ voice, it can really break the spell. Reality intrudes on one’s imaginings. No surprise that most people in Second Life communicate only with the IM/chat.
• There is a discouraging amount of reproducing in Second Life exactly what exists and happens in real life. Given the imaginative potential of this world, this is ghastly to behold. 
• There is the potential of ‘stalking’ in Second Life. It’s kind of dumb, because there are so many other characters there you can get infatuated with instead, but it’s possible, easy to do, and next to consequence free.
• You learn by making mistakes, not by reading manuals. This is embarrassing, sometimes even humiliating. Some people will be kind when this happens. Some will be cruel. Most will be indifferent.

In some ways, Second Life is ‘better’ than real life. Therein lies its seductive appeal:

• There are no physically ugly places there. Some places are surreal, mindbending like a good trip (in both senses of the word trip), provocative, stimulating, relaxing.
• There are no physically ugly people there. Everyone is beautiful, even those who adopt grotesque appearances and costumes. Almost everyone is young, healthy and well-endowed. You need no food or water, or to consume anything to thrive. Everyone lives forever. (Some people may think this is not a good thing.)
• You can buy weapons, but, from what I can tell, you can’t hurt or kill anyone with them, so they are pretty rare. 
• Everyone can fly and teleport anywhere else instantly. There are no carbon emissions in Second Life, no pollution, no waste.
• With some limitations (some severe, others not) you can do some interesting social simulations in Second Life and repeat them over and over, learning each time. You could, for example, create an intentional community, and experiment with real people ‘living’ in it to discover compatibility, learn to create consensus etc. Some aspects of Second Life are much like an idealized Gift/Generosity Economy, which is intriguing to study. You can live quite comfortably, free, or you can spend a small fortune if you want to.
• You can record anything you want in Second Life, relive it over and over, and erase it whenever you like.

In some ways, Second Life is inferior to real life. These can ‘get’ to you quite quickly:

• As superficially beautiful as the many created environments in Second Life are, they are strangely flat, two-dimensional. They lack the drama of real-life natural beauty.
• There are no realistic wild creatures in Second Life. You can choose an animal as your avatar, but you just can’t behave like an animal, and the creatures ‘programmed’ to do things over and over in Second Life are mechanical, and therefore depressing. It’s a wilderness in there, but not in a good way.
• The visual and aural effects in Second Life are very clever, and because so many people have been involved in their creation they rarely get boring. But they are all two-dimensional, not immersive, and the rest of your senses are not engaged at all. After a while you get a kind of numbness setting in as a result.
• While it’s a complex social environment (ten million avatars have been created and tens of thousands are online at any time, moving or teleporting from one place to another), it’s not a complex ecological environment. The scenery is lovely but it’s fake. You can’t do ecological simulations there.
• Voyeurism and exhibitionism are rampant, and tolerated, even encouraged. Staring at others is not a bad way to learn how to operate in Second Life, but it makes you feel uncomfortable, queasy.
• Your whereabouts can be tracked throughout the vast spaces of Second Life, over time. Big Brother may be watching you. Probably is, in fact.

So what’s the potential here for holding virtual meetings and distance learning sessions in Second Life? I think it’s extraordinary, with a few caveats:

1. There needs to be a way to require ‘full disclosure’ of your true identity as a condition of participating in serious events like meetings and education sessions. One click on someone’s avatar at a ‘full disclosure’ event and you should be able to see their real photo, age, gender, and highlights of their CV. That context is essential for trust and meaningful sustainable communication.
2. There needs to be a way to ‘transport’ windows from your computer screen into the Second Life environment. Jumping back and forth from the Second Life view to the desktop videoconferencing or screen-sharing application is just too jarring. It spoils the whole illusion of really being there together.
3. It would be very helpful (and not just for these applications) to have an nTag-type feature built into Second Life. nTag is a badge that contains magnetic information about your personal interests, skills and experiences, and when you are physically close to someone else who shares these qualities, it lights up and displays what you have in common. This would be relatively easy to add to Second Life, and would be a brilliant addition to it, perhaps even transforming into an important Social Networking tool.
4. One of the critical advantages of face-to-face learning over distance learning is the ability to demonstrate to students how to do something, and let them practice. This would be much more difficult to do in Second Life, but without it, some face-to-face practice sessions will always be needed, which is a serious constraint. We learn by doing, not just by listening.

Despite these caveats, I’m really excited about the potential of virtual environments like Second Life as meeting and learning tools. I can even imagine having an Open Space event in Second Life, complete with the invitations, the opening forum, the breakout sessions (each recorded automatically), and even, virtually, the exercise of the Law of Two Feet. I wonder if any Open Space experts have thought about this. I betthey have.