If you haven't got a life, try a second one!

I, a person of uniformly little faith, have confidence nonetheless that, someday soon, there will come another "20 Things" assignment that will not make my skin crawl to consider. Until such a day as that arrives, however, allow me to blog my thoughts on Second Life...

My first exposure to anything like Second Life came from Snow Crash, which I read as a senior in college for my linguistics class. The class was "Babel to the Brain: The Origin of Language in Western Thought," and I think we were looking at it to project a future evolution of language and the agency of language (through the virus manifest, etc.), and I remember being creeped out by the idea of the Metaverse. I knew about RPGs--heck, my campus even had an active group of LARPers who held weapon-making workshops!--but I could not imagine a physical world in which such a virtual world existed. Oh, don't think me completely naïve: I puttered around The Palace for quite a while when I was new on the Internet and got myself into situations I shouldn't have been in at fourteen... but a completely made-up world patterned after our own? Ridiculous.

Or so I thought in 2005. The summer of 2006 introduced me to another aspect of Second Life when I met a man who encouraged me to check out Second Life--visit his shop there, chat. He was working for me at Kings Dominion and was about to start a messy divorce that he didn't talk much about. As his tenure at the park wore on, he felt increasingly more comfortable around me and eventually divulged that his wife didn't know he was leaving her, but he was in love with another woman and was moving to Texas at the end of the season to live with her. He would not be returning to North Carolina, where he attended school, and would not be reuniting with his wife and two children. No, he was giving it all up for the girl in Texas. When I asked if his wife knew about her, he said no. I asked where he had met her, if she was in school in Texas and he in NC. "Second Life," he said so quickly that the words just breezed past my ear. "Where?" I asked, thinking I had missed the name of a town or a university or a 4H conference. He told me again (and again and again until I finally caught what he was saying) and then revealed the kicker: he'd never met her in person. He was excited about his flight to Texas because he would finally be meeting her. That man threw away everything in his physical life to make his virtual one become a reality. To me, that went beyond creepy.

I am reminded of the Law & Order: SVU episode "Avatar" which is based on the premise of Second Life. Although that episode is generally lauded as one of the worst and least realistic (no puns intended) of the series (some even claim that's when SVU jumped the shark, if it has yet), it put a great big spotlight on problems similar to the one I mentioned above--the virtual world seeping into the physical. And I'll admit, watching the episode alone in the house where I was house-sitting, cut off from my friends and most of the outside world, there was a weak little part of me that thought, "Yeah... I'll just go online and create a personality for myself--the ultimate me. The person I should have been born but could never become!" But by the time I went to bed that night, that delusion had mercifully faded. There are some things that just shouldn't happen, and that's why they don't in the physical world. Give someone the ability to make it happen in a metauniverse, and you've just opened a can of flesh-eating worms--because no one's patrolling those things, no one is monitoring the RL users, there's no Jiminy Cricket standing by the users' monitors going, "Ah-ah-ah... you're about to log off this computer and re-enter your real life! Time to start thinking rationally again!"

I loved the videos I watched on YouTube. I watched some of the joke ones, of course, and I also watched the intro vid that sounds like it's being narrated by Thomas Sangster circa 2003. Cute stuff. Knew about the product placement in Second Life, didn't know about the things like Harvard lectures.

Does Second Life have a place in libraries? I feel like it has to, otherwise the question wouldn't be asked, and we wouldn't be exploring it as an exercise. Of course, I imagine that a library could set itself up as its own business in Second Life and serve the users who were interested. But... since I don't see the point of using Second Life in the first place, I'm not sure I see the point of libraries doing the same.