Second Life At a Glance

What exactly is Secondlife.com? If you're familiar with the term virtual community you'd see that Secondlife.com is an ideal example of a virtual community. Secondlife.com is exactly that; a second life. It's a website that offers users the opportunity to create an avatar and explore a new identity in a vast virtual world. Secondlife.com is incredibly in-depth; there seems to be something for everyone in this virtual community. Activities range from live concerts, sporting events, art exhibitions, and even education. This creates an ideal space for a participatory culture and world making. There seems to be no limit to what Secondlife.com can do; if the developers wanted to do create some new aspect of Second Life (i.e. elections), they could totally do it.

There are also many opportunities for democracy on Second Life. Imagine a virtual community that was governed by a virtual governing body. Second Life totally has the capacity to implement something like this. Something like this would be great for educational purposes. For example, there are many universities that already have a presence on Second Life. These institutions could use this idea for education in the political sciences field. Perhaps create their own island that's exclusive for the particular educational institution where students can participate in free elections, governing a populace, and other political activities.

Since Second Life also has great potential for collective intelligence. You can gain all the information you need to know about Second Life right on Second Life; Second Life is its own affinity space. You can chat with other members and find out exactly what you need to know about any given aspect of Second Life. Since Second Life is its own affinity space, that means there is a transfer of messages between users. Since there is a transfer of messages among users, anywhere in Second Life has the potential to become a "town square." Meaning any place can, theoretically, become a place where users can meet and discuss topics that effect their community; making it ideal for democracy to flourish.

Not only is Second Life a very large virtual community, it has many sub-communities within it. These sub-communities relate to the interests users have in their "first lives." For instance, if a user is interested in the culture of Berlin, they can enter the "New Berlin" community. There are a great deal of communities on Second Life; there's something for every user.

Playing around on Second Life was a great and unique experience; similar but still quite different from the Xbox Live online community we (Rob and Tim) are used to. At first, unfortunately, we thought the idea was a bit absurd. However, we immediately warmed up to the idea. There's even a possibility that we'll create our own Second Life avatar and actively participate in the virtual community.