I had just recently posted a long ramble on a listserv about a similar topic (how to get more people to participate in various social media forums), and stumbled on Dr. Jenkins' post here, where he serendipitously echoes some of the same things I was rambling about. My ramble is of far less value than a few paragraphs pulled from Jenkin's pithy observations here, some thoughts I just wanted to save.
Most of this is a response to Clay Shirky, which is fine, but those were not the parts that I found most interesting, so I'm skipping all that context, but leaving the links if you want to pursue the thread. Blah. Seems to me that most of Shirky's objections beg the question. I'm with Jenkins all the way. Bold emphasis is mine.
Link: Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: A Second Look at Second Life.
A Second Look at Second Life
A few weeks ago, I posted here about the debate surrounding Second Life which was triggered by a high-profile critique of the popular multiverse by longtime cyber-pundit Clay Shirky. After corresponding with Shirky and with my colleague Beth Coleman, it was decided that we would offer some new statements about this controversy across our three blogs today and respond to each other's posts in about a week's time. We also agreed that we would post links to the other posts through our sites which would help readers navigate between the various positions. So, if you want to read the latest by Clay Shirky, you can find it here and if you want to read the latest by Beth Coleman, you can find it here. (These links will only go live once I know the other material is up on line.) None of us have had a chance so far to review what the others will say so I anticipate that the first round will mostly be a restating of or clarification of our previous positions.
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The numbers matter if we are asking whether Second Life represents "the future of the web" but personally, I have never believed that SL is going to be a mass movement in any meaningful sense of the term. As I stated last time, I do not buy the whole nonsense that immersive worlds represent web 3.0 and will in any way displace the existing information structures that exist in the web, any more than I think audio-visual communications is going to replace written communications anytime soon. If nothing else, the ability to scan through text quickly gives it an efficiency that will not be replaced by more "technically advanced" solutions which are more time consuming to produce and to consume. I am pretty sure that the value of the web/net lies in asynchronous communications and that real time interactions -- whether we are talking 3d or skype -- will always represent a special class of uses which competes not with the web but with other teleconferencing technologies. Most of us will find uses for virtual worlds one of these days; most of us will not "live" there nor will we conduct most of our business there.
I do not even think that Second Life represents the future of multiplayer games -- it represents one end of a spectrum of player experiences which maximizes player generated content and minimizes the prestructured experiences we associate with most computer games. World of Warcraft represents the other end of that spectrum and so far, that model draws more customers. My own ideal lays perhaps some place in the middle. As such, this becomes a debate not about affordances but about the desirability of professional entertainment versus the pleasures of participatory culture. It also becomes an exercise in mapping what some have described as the pyramid of participation in which the harder it is to create content, the higher the percentage of participants who will chose to consume content someone else has produced. What's striking to me is not that so many people still prefer to consume professionally generated content (it has always been thus) but what a growing percent of people are willing to consume amateur content and what a smaller but still significant percentage of people are willing to generate and share content they produced themselves. Second Life interests me as a particular model of participatory culture.
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Some have dismissed SL as a costume party -- I see it more as carnival in the medieval sense of the term -- as a time and place within which normal rules of interactions are suspended, roles can be swapped or transformed, hierarchies can be reordered, and we can step out of normal reality into a "magic circle" or "green world" which can be highly generative for the imagination. The difference is that in the old days, carnival was something that existed for a very short period of time and people planned for it all year. Now, in the era of SL, carnival exists all the day and people have to decide how much time they want to spend there. In the old days, the power structures that led to carnival were religious and the church had to decide whether or not to embrace the popular rites. Today, the power structures that lead to SL are corporate and companies have to decide whether or not to embrace the popular rites. That corporate America seems to be experimenting with the alternative reality that constitutes SL is news -- even if many of these experiments fail and even if many of these companies have no clue what to do with their islands and even if most of them go back into their cloisters in another year or two.
3. The hype about Second Life is emerging because tech reporters are young and have no sense of history, because virtual reality is easy to grasp compared to the complexities of social networks, because writing about SL still keeps the focus on content, and because so many powerful groups have a vested interest in sending out press releases about the cool project they are doing in Second Life.
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I care only a little bit about the future of virtual worlds. I care a great deal about the future of participatory culture. And for the moment, the debate about and the hype surrounding SL is keeping alive the idea that we might design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own culture. That's something worth defending.
Shirky concludes, "Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand....There's nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error."
By those criteria, the Renaissance and the Age of Reason were less than rounding errors since the key innovations occurred among a much smaller number of artists and thinkers. This is to subscribe to a quantitative model of history which simply doesn't reflect the reality of how cultural innovation occurs. A small community of people can generate an enormously rich culture and can have a transforming impact on society as a whole. I am not saying SL has achieved this yet -- and indeed, it may never live up to that potential -- but I don't want to lose sight of the fact that the importance of SL has squat to do with such statistical measures -- though what those measures have to say about its market value may be another value.
I respect what Shirky is doing here in questioning the numbers. I just want to push us to ask deeper questions about the criteria we use to measure the value of Second Life.
As I wrote last time, "Second Life isn't interesting to me because of how many people go there; it's interesting because of what they do when they get there."
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