Evaluation of Artefact 3: Seond life

To consider the real effect of on-line community on people who do actually extensivley use it I decided to join the social “world” Second Life.

It wasn't such an uplifting experience as described on the site but I did learn a lot about interesting factors of on-line and virtual communities. I spent the majority of my time in Second life trying to find people who were engaging and interesting to talk to. I found most of the people who were members were in fact active in Second Life for the same reasons as many of the other social networks (promotion, money making, chit chat).

The majority of users were older people which was surprising but makes sense. There is also a big separation of users just like in real world – there are users that want to meet people of similar interests and socialise but there are also people who abuse the network or engage in acts that aren't generally deemed acceptable. A lot like other social networks SL has been commercially exploited, this is again a corresponding factor that is share by popular social events in the real world. In fact SL is almost an accurate Virtual Reality of the real world – with one worrying difference. The fact that you can physically see the person you communicate with leaves a huge level of mistrust – something that SL seem to except many commenting the fact that their appearance age etc. inside SL is completely different. With this in mind you can never believe 100% of anything said or seen in SL.

I tried to discover whether users felt that SL could actually break down Real World community and contact with people or whether it merely filled a gapped that already existed for people who were not socially inept. Most thought it depended on the person and so you cannot answer the question – most members did not think SL broke down RL (but this is maybe expected seen as they are members) but thought SL just brings more people together just the same as Facebook etc.
In my opinion it is probably better than face book and Myspace – this is because you do actually meet new people and not just relate to your RL social network on-line. However the negatives of SL are far more extreme and perhaps more socially dangerous than the others. More addictive, more scope for anti-social behaviour, more breeding for negative social views, not as passive communication so a lot more engrossing. But these negatives do only apply to a minority, which in reality is the same as the RL.

For those genuinely looking for new friendships SL is a good tool – but is also a tool for those wishing to escape reality and re-create themselves sometimes for inappropriate behaviour. I don't think governing them more strictly on-line is the answer as that implies that these social networks are reality – they are not – the governing needs to be done in our real world society, if society understands what is acceptable and what is not, then that should carry into VR. It could also be argued that SL could distract some people from carrying out their wring behaviour in RL!