I must admit I have been rather skeptical about the hype surrounding Second Life but I didn't want to be a hater. So I decided to give Second Life another go this morning. The opportunity to use Second Life again came about when the Media in Transition 5 (MiT5) conference allowed individuals to participate in the sessions in real time and virtually. So I was all excited about that and really wanted to attend the plenary session on "Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures" today at 12.30pm.
The day began rather badly (I overslept) and had to hurriedly get logged-on to Second Life, figure out how to navigate myself to the conference location, make sure that I had the right permissions to join the New Media Consortium campus (NMC), figure out how to trigger the video ... etc etc. But I finally made it in time for the conference ... only to sit there waiting for the simulcast of the plenary session to screen. And as you can see from the image above, all I got on the screen was an icon for Quicktime loading for 45mins. And it wasn't just me; apparently most of the people who made it for the virtual simulcast, and who were not physically located in MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, were not able to view the video ...
Which makes me wonder ... why the extra overhead of using Second Life to be "virtually present" when only people who were physically co-located in MIT could view the video? I thought that was doubly ironic!!!
I haven't yet gone back into Second Life to see if the video issues have been resolved. And I don't want to be unfair to the organizers who have graciously tried to make sure that people who were not able to attend the sold-out MiT5 conference were able to do so virtually. However, it really begs the question about the virtues of Second Life that have been hyped all over the media. It really was a lot of extra overhead in terms of effort, processing cycles and bandwidth to attend a conference virtually.
On the plus side, I was able to interact with the folks around me. For example, I was sitting next to a certain "Doug Whittaker" (see image above) and we were helping each other out with the video simulcast problem. I don't know who "Doug Whittaker" really is and he might even be halfway across the world from me. But we were sitting virtually next to each other :)
Update:
Given some of the comments that I got for this post, I thought that it's important for me to clarify that the image you see above highlights only myself and doug whittaker. In fact, there were several other people at the event. Hopefully, the image below will provide you with a better context of who else was there.
2 comments:
When Dan first heard about second life, his response was, "Why do I need a second life? My first one is boring enough."
I don't really know Second Life, but my reaction to this and other representational virtual worlds is that they're capturing the surface but missing the depth. From an "is this a good idea" point of view, I can get past technical problems. But assuming everything works correctly, I'm still not sure why doing this in Second Life would be better than using any other virtual meeting platform.
Maybe spatiality and avatars encourage more interaction among people who don't know each other? Is the space used to structure the social interaction (e.g. we know who is important because they're on stage) like it does in real life? Or does a virtual world like this keep us from getting beyond the problems of space (e.g. people in the back of the room feeling less engaged than those in front)?
I think it probably could be useful in the right circumstances, but like you, I'm skeptical that it's worth the overhead.
That sucks - I was wondering too why there was a point to doing it in Second Life (or trying to do it..) rather than simply streaming it. I'm actually here at MiT5, and there's a guy here in the second plenary, which is also supposed to be being streamed to Second LIfe, from Linden Labs, and he argued that there is no community in blogs - we just yell at each other from hilltops with megaphones, you see, we have no genuine audience or community. Whereas in Second Life, you get to chat with the audience.
Of course, if there were only two of you there, and the stream didn't work... well...
Hope you don't mind, but I borrowed your image for my blog, let me know if you want me to take it off.
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