Professor Artz's Reflections on Second Life

Professor John M. Artz
Department of Information Systems
and Technology Management
515E Funger Hall
The George Washington University
Washington DC 20052, USA
(202) 994-4931 (office)
E-Mail: jartz@gwu.edu
WebPage: http://home.gwu.edu/~jartz

About Professor Artz

Dr. John M. Artz is an Associate Professor of Information Systems in the School of Business at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He teaches courses in Relational Databases, Data Warehousing, Web Based Systems Development, and Philosophy of Science for Business and Management Research. His research interests are in Philosophical Foundations of Information Systems, Philosophical Issues in Relational Database and Data Warehouse Design and Philosophy of Science as it applies to Information Systems Research. One of Dr. Artz's special interests is in the role of the imagination in analysis, design, research and technology forecasting.

About Second Life

Second Life is actually a brand name for a Global 3D Virtual Reality environment. Another term sometimes used is Metaverse, a word coined in Neil Stephenson's post cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. I will use the term Second Life to refer to this cluster of technologies although I am fully aware of the fact that by the time this technology becomes mainstream the name of Second Life might be little more than a historical footnote like the name of the first PC operating system (CP/M) or the first electronic spreadsheet (Visicalc). I also like the term Metaverse but Second Life has a little catching up to do to deserve the name Metaverse and I am doing my best to stay grounded in the here and now with only reasonable speculations for the future. Having said all that, Second Life is used, today, primarily for social networking. That is, people get a Second Life account, create an avatar (a digitally rendered little person who represents you in Second Life), and send their avatar into Second Life to explore and interact with the avatars of others. Second Life consists of land regions, or sims, which can be thought of, loosely, as three dimensional analogs to a web site. Regions provide shopping, socializing, education, and some are just interesting places to visit. Some avatars just sightsee. Others socialize. Some learn. And many shop. Some start businesses and some show off their artistic abilities. In an ordinary chat room, personal expressiveness is limited to the name you use and the things you say. In Second Life you can shape your avatar, buy clothes, hairstyles and jewelry, and you can demonstrate your shopping and exploring prowess by showing off gadgets, trinkets and clothing that you have found. If Second Life were nothing more than that, it would still be pretty impressive. But it is much more and thinking about all the possiblities very quickly becomes mind boggling. So we will leave it at that for now.

About These Webpages

The dominant metaphor for the web is the document metaphor. One can think of the web as one huge document made up of smaller documents of various types. Common types include the brochure, the catalog, the organic encyclopedia, and the diary. The brochure format is popular for corporate websites. The catalog is frequently used for retail sites. The organic encyclopedia is used for Wikis. And the diary model is used for blogs. I explain all this to say that this collection does not follow any of those traditional models. I think of it as an evolving electronic notebook in which I record thoughts and evolve them over time. Some thoughts I preserve because I want to keep early impressions. In some cases I will update my notes to reflect greater understanding or insight. In some cases a topic will be addressed multiple times in multiple places to provide different perspectives. And I am structuring these pages to be read rather than to help the visitor find a particular piece of information. I do go on a bit in places. And sometimes I may appear to digress. Second Life is an evolving phenomenon and the structure of our understanding is evolving along with it. So I will keep these as organized as I can, but I value being informative over being completely organized. My first objective in putting things in these pages is that I believe the information will help other people understand Second Life. Since visitors will have widely varying levels of understanding when they come to these pages, you will find that the information on these pages is widely varing in depth and insight. At the same time, I believe that web page content developers should work hard so that visitors don't have to. So I will do the best I can to keep it all under control. My second objective is that any visitor who takes time to read these pages regardless of their background will leave these pages with something to think about. Hopefully, something they have never thought about before.

How It All Began

Some time around the beginning of October 2006 one of my colleagues, Professor Lumley, passed me in the hallway between faculty meetings and asked if I had heard of a new technology called Second Life. I said I hadn't and, in the thirty seconds that elapsed as we passed, he attempted to explain this new techology to me, as well as, why I should have a look at it. I made a few polite blow off remarks as I am inclined to do. "It sounds very interesting. I'll have a look when I get a chance." And that sort of thing. As he headed into the Men's room and I headed into my office suite, he reminded me of the website www.SecondLife.com. I replied with some gratuitous noncommittal remark and continued about my business with no real intention of following up. (If you are an academic reading this, you probably recognize this scenario all too well.)

I have seen the radical changes brought on by mainframe computers, relational databases, personal computers, graphical user interfaces, networks, and web technologies. I have also seen endless technologies, far to numerous to recount, that have grossly over promised their impacts. So I have, over the years, become quite the skeptic. But something Lumley said caught my attention. Second Life is a global shared 3D virtual world where people may, ultimately, go to work without ever leaving their homes. That caught my attention because other research, I had been doing, suggested that the nature of work may very well change in the future and Second Life sounded like an enabling technology. I should mention, before proceeding, I now realize that Second Life is much more than that. However, at the time, that was enough to get me to take a further look at it.

I went to the Second Life website, set up a free account, and then nervously downloaded and installed their browser, the Second Life client. I logged into Second Life, saw my Avatar, and proceeded to do the tutorials on Orientation Island. Within a few short hours I was totally lost and completely overwhelmed. But I stuck with it. Eventually, I found my way to Help Island Public where I could ask questions but my questions were far too big. The wonderfully helpful people at Help Island can tell you how to make a landmark, but they cannot tell you what to do with your time in Second Life. If you ask them, they will answer with a question, "What do you want to do?" I found that to be absolutely no help at all. But, I stuck with it and tried to learn a little more about this virtual universe. A week or two later I saw Lumley again and reported my findings. "It is an impressive technology with enormous potential, but definately not ready for prime time." Over six months later, with hundreds and hundreds of hours invested, I still felt the same way. Impressive technology. Enormous potential. Not ready for prime time.

I recount my experience here because I suspect that many people have had similar experiences. The Second Life statistics for May 28, 2007 (the day I was writing this piece but not remarkable in any other way) claimed 6,764,908 accounts; 1,739,130 logged in within the last 60 days; and 34,967 were online at the moment. Impressive statistics but lets take a closer look. 5,025,778 or 75% of the accounts had not logged in within the last 60 days. And 6,730,423 or 99.4% of the accounts were not on at the moment. These figures are reasonably representative and mean something, although I am not sure what. I find that people tend to fall into one of two camps. Either they are overwhelmed and put off by this new technology or they are completely seduced and addicted. I for better or worse have fallen into both camps. However, these experiences should not interfer with the future potential of this technology. And one of the purposes of these pages to help get us from "not ready for prime time" to exploitation of future potential.

Resistence to the New

It is interesting to see how people will resist the idea of new technologies on the horizon. Back in the early 1990's I was teaching a class in networks and telecommunications. I did then, as now, enjoy making predictions about the future impacts of technologies. "The idea of sitting by the phone," I would say, "in order to get a phone call will beome a thing of the past. You will carry your phone with you and the network will find you." Not a very bold claim given what we know today about cell phones but a threatening claim in the early 1990's. There was, always, immediate and strong resistences to this notion. "Telephones are way to big to carry around with you." "How is the network going to 'find' you? Is that some sort of invasion of privacy?" "Why would I carry my phone with me? I often try to get away from the phone on purpose." "Why would I want to be accessible 24/7?" And so on. Of course these were all reasonable protests but none of them made any difference.

A couple of years later when web technologies were moving to the foreground I would proclaim "In the future you will go to your computer to buy things rather that go to the mall." This was met with a chorus of predictable objections. "How can you buy something you haven't tried on?" "How can you buy something you can't even touch?" "How do you know the store is real?" "Would you risk giving your credit card number to some website you know nothing about?" And on, and on. Of course, once again, these were all reasonable protests. And again, none of them made any difference. Why is that?

These protests are not protests against a technology. They are protests against an impending change. The future is going to be different and we don't understand how. Nor do we understand the implications of those differences or how they will affect us. This makes us nervous. So, in response we come up with defensive reasons why this won't happen in order to make ourselves feel better. But these changes do happen and they are going to continue to happen.

When I ask people if they have tried Second Life I get the same sort of protests. "I hear there are reliability problems." "I am afriad I would get addicted." "It is too complicated." And so on. When I talk about making friends from all over the world, I get standrad responses. "How do you know who is really behind the avatar." "I hear there are men pretending to be women" "How do you know you are not talking to a teen aged boy?" And so on. When I talk about education or work in a virtual environment I get another set of stock protests. "How can you trust someone if you can't see their face?" "Don't you know that body language is important in communication?" "Being with someone in a virtual world just isn't the same as being physically close." And so on, and so on.

These are all reasonable protests. And none of them will make any difference. Second Life can be overwhelming. It is hard to understand the technology as it is today with all its unexploited potential much less see where this technology is likely to go. So I have put together these pages in an attempt to allay some of these fears. I explain Second Life as it is today. I attempt to give as wide a range of understanding as I can. And I speculate on where this technology is likely to go in the future and assess some of the implications of the techology. I have enjoyed six months of Second Life at this point and look forward to many, many years of continued enjoyment.

(N.B. I am now within a month of my one year anniversary in Second Life. I am in the process of reviewing and revising these pages. I have built an Academy in Second Life called Cosmos Academy after my main avatar. If you have a Second Life account you can click on the link and it will take you there. Or from within Second Life you can go to Search Places and type in Cosmos Academy. I am now moving on to a second project - I am just starting on the Cosmos Bureau of Economic Statistics. I indend to take data from the Second Life website and analyze it further to better understand what is going on there. I will put spreadsheets in this collection along with some analysis. So, I am still progressing, still learning, and I am still very much impressed with the untapped potential.)

Layout of the Site

These webpages are divided into five largely mutually exclusive sections.

More About . . . : More about Second Life. More about me, my alts, my colleagues and students. And More About what I am trying to do in Second Life.
Exploring : One of the first things to do in Second Life is to begin looking around, or, in Second Life terms, Exploring. There is sightseeing and shopping. There are bars, discos and beaches. There are museums and places to take classes. And there are places to hang out and meet other people. These pages introduce you to some of people you might meet in Second Life and some of the places you could go. Exploring and experiencing Second Life goes a long way toward helping you make sense out it. And the places you will find on these pages can help you get started.
Learning : There are two aspect to learning in Second Life. One is learning about Second Life and the other is using Second to deliver tradition education. This section addresses both of these aspects. These pages will provide some tutorial information to get you started, then some links to some of the best inworld tutorials in Second Life. Finally they provide some information on the presence of educators in Second Life who are studying the technology in terms of its future uses for education.
Commentary : In this section I reflect on Second Life providing analysis and commentary on a variety of topics from the nature of Second Life as a technological discontinutiy to unforseen psychological consequences of using Second Life.
Economics : (coming soon) - Linden Labs generously provides a bounty of useful information on their website. Most of it is presented in such a way as to look favorable for Second Life. However, if one is going to invest seriously in Second Life they need a more realistic analysis. This new secion will provide more in depth data analysis using data publically available from the Second Life website.

When I started Second Life in the Fall of 2006 there were no books available. Since then a number of them have come out. More are coming out. And there are some which were out at the time but were not obviously related. As I encounter new books and have a chance to read them, I will put the reference and some comments in my Annotated Bibliography. I make no attempt to keep track of all the news stories because that alone would be a full time job.

Warning!!

This site is under construction. It will alway be under contruction. There are pieces of it I will probably never get to. There will always be new pieces. There will be reorganizations and rewrites. If the site were ever completed, that would mean that my thinking with regard to Second Life had stopped evolving. And if that happened, I would have to give up Second Life.

Last Updated in September 2007