In follow-up to my posting about the tracking traffic on a sim using Jon Brouchard’s new script from his Reflexive Architecture projects, I ran across a posting by Storygeek entitled Second Life is Not Empty.
He hits on many of the points I do, and that in part is the purpose of Jon’s Reflexive Architecture and adds a few that I think are worth considering.
But to summarize a few things: you might find yourself wandering Second Life (or other virtual worlds) looking for the dots – groups of people to chat with, meet up with, or do stuff with (yeah, I know, “stuff” can often have a very specific, um, outcome in mind).
Storygeek reminds us:
- We might think a club is “dead” if there’s no one there when we visit. But most RL clubs I know are only REALLY busy a few hours at most a night. Would you call a club a failure if it was empty 20 hours a day but packed the other 4? Remember, SL is a 24/7 environment.
- Likewise, we might not see a lot of “dot clusters” but that doesn’t mean there isn’t rich discussion and social interaction happening. With new viewers, some of this can be happening without individuals even being “present” – they may be communicating via e-mail or they may be in world through a Web browser that doesn’t allow avatar movement.
- In RL, how often is a social group of friends (or even strangers for that matter) available to satisfy our whim to be entertained or ’social’? Social activities don’t happen because we want them to, they take a circle of friends, a network of shared plans, an understanding of each other’s patterns and preferences. Same is true for SL.
- For businesses, evaluating retail based purely on “how crowded the malls are” ignores the fact that a lot of browsing and shopping IS going on – but it’s through the search and classified listings and SLExchange and OnRez. On the one hand, these are virtual spaces but on the other they are worlds with a far more developed information shadow than the real world. Mind you, the day WILL come when my cell phone will tell me which stores in a mall to avoid and which ones to rush to, until then I have SL to practice the idea of information ubiquity which can be a real time saver when it comes to finding a decent pair of jeans (having said that, I can’t wait for a proper Google-type search engine! Lack of boolean search is sooooo ridiculous).
Thanks Storygeek for some additional thoughts!
