Is Second Life the future?  Or a cul de sac?  At this point, it’s hard to say. 

Clay Shirky put a cat among the pigeons when he asked whether the Second Life
numbers were reliable.  The SL website now claims 3,350,286 residents
with something like a third of these having actually made an appearance
in the last 60 days.  Shirky called earlier estimates "methodologically
worthless."  He figures 5 out of 6 new users abandon their accounts
before the first month is up.  After 90 days, 9 of 10 "residents" have
disappeared. 

Shirky’s skepticism forced a reframing of the
question: "ok, if we can’t prove this argument by the numbers, is there
another way to make the case?"

Shirky is skeptical here too.  He believes Second Life

will
remain a niche application, which is to say an application that will be
of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try
it.  Such niches can be profitable…but they won’t, by definition,
appeal to a broad cross-section of users. 

Both Henry Jenkins
and Beth Coleman beg to differ.  Coleman says that SL gives us an
important "amplification" of the virtual world possibility.  Whether SL
is the virtual world that takes, there can’t be any doubt that some virtual
world will. SL matters, she argues, because it represents a "tipping
point" that releases virtual worlds from their niche status. 

Henry
Jenkins calls SL is a "test bed for innovation" for business,
government, education, civic, nonprofit, and amateur media makers.  He
suggests SL offers virtual worlds a kind of "proof of concept" (my
term, not his)  For all its failings, SL is perhaps good enough to help
install the possibility (the idea and the potentiality) of virtual
worlds in popular culture. 

It’s a niche play, Shirky says.  No, say Jenkins and Coleman, that’s precisely what it just ceased to be. Numbers aside, they say, SL just cleared the bar.  It is now part of our culture. 

I hear both arguments. 

an argument for Second Life

I
agree with Jenkins and Coleman.  SL makes this much incontrovertible:
it is now technologically possible for a very large number of people to
gather and interact in a visually rich and responsive virtual space.
Incontrovertible and astonishing.  It is hard to think of a real world
correlate.  It’s as if another Disney empire (Disneyland, Disney World,
Disney Resorts) just dropped from the sky. Um, that doesn’t go nearly
far enough.  It’s as if a Scandinavian world was just lowered onto the
planet.  At a minimum, we’re obliged to say our culture and our
marketplace just got vastly larger.  We would be unwise to dismiss or
diminish it.

We might also risk a bit of filmic wisdom: if you
build it, they will come.  Whatever else they are, human beings are
relentlessly curious.  Give them a social space to occupy it and they
will fill it en masse.  And fill it they did, three million of them. 

But
that’s the issue, isn’t it?  Yes, they came, but did they stay?  Are
they "residents" as SL likes to call them, or the most capricious kind
of tourist?  The fact of the matter is that SL churns like crazy.  This
could be yet another technology that cannot find a problem to solve.
Yet another hammer looking for a nail. Still, Coleman’s point is a good
one. These are early days.  Indeed, television took several years to
find a place in our lives.  Why should Second Life be any different? 

I have another colleague at MIT who believes he knows exactly what Second Life
can be.  Ilya Vedrashko says it is, among other things, the new mall.
All of us shop on line but we can’t drift from store to store, observe
the shopping choices of other people, or enjoy the effects of
serendipity.  (We didn’t know we wanted another gadget from Sharper Image the last time, but there it was…at the mall.)  Second Life
can duplicate all of this even as it makes it possible to try things on
without the privations or indignities of a changing room.  Click on
something and look in the mirror.  (Vedrashko makes a larger, more
interesting argument than I can here.  Catch it if you can.)

Second Life
also has the potential to change tourism, working like a time machine
in space, as it were.  Let’s suppose that someday, the virtual
Lindentown will someday be as different from my usual virtual haunts,
as Miami is from New York City.  If I wish to go to Miami, it will cost
me money, time, effort, and inconvenience.  But an afternoon in Lindentown costs me nothing more than the click of a mouse.

Second Life could serve as a magnificent platform for the new global university or b-school.  Now all that fund raising would be about intellectual content and content providers, and hiring good teachers.  Not a penny need be spent on bricks and mortar.  Even the reunions can be held on line.

For all we know, Second Life might be the place that consumers go to help create the brands they care about.  It would be easy to create open air laboratories equipped with tools for developing concepts and changing prototypes.  And this will
matter as marketing moves from "see" to "be."  (My "see to be"
model: if you want me to see the marketing you will have to have given
me a chance to be the marketing.  (But see my doubts noted yesterday.
It is necessary that I had a chance to be it.) 

These are not
small claims.  Changing the nature of retail, adding new terrains to
the world of tourism, inventing the new university, creating the products and brands of the future, these would
make Second Life something more than a cul de sac.  By
this reckoning, SL not merely part of the future.  It will be one of
the things that makes the future.

an argument against Second Life

I’ve done my due diligence as an anthropologist.  I signed up for Second Life.
I spent some hours trooping around, poking my head in where it was not
always welcome, pestering people with annoying questions.  And on
balance I must hear agree with Shirky.  So far there is more smoke than
fire.  When people bang the drum of enthusiasm for SL, they cannot be
talking about the present SL.

For most of my visit, Second Life
felt like a ghost ship.  I admired the ingenuity of the architecture,
the skill of the coding, the homes on the water, the view from some
properties.  But very often I found myself in a world without people.
Lindentown is vaporville.  There are lots of buildings.  Just no
people.  It’s a little like downtown Detroit on the weekend.  You can
walk for miles and see not a soul. 

Then it dawns on you.  (It
always takes the anthropologist longer.)  No one lives here.  It is fun
to build these spaces but all appearances to the contrary, you can’t
actually live in them.  No one goes to their Second Life pied-a-terre
for the weekend.  (Pied-a-vapeur?)  No one rushes there to stage a
dinner party, welcome the kids home for the weekend, or curl up in
front of TV. 

This problem creates a problem.  Second Life
is frequently a stage without actors. What is missing isthe small
murmur of activity, the gentle dynamism that other people bring to our
lives.  This may be what we mean by "perfect strangers." These
are the people who create movement, visual stimulation, a steady
current of minor commotion without actually ever impinging on our lives
in any irritating way.  Second Life has no perfect strangers.

The absence of this dynamism means, among other things, that SL cannot create a new tourism.   The existing world of Second Life
fails to capture us for the same reason that Celebration, Florida (the
instant town build by Disney) originally disappointed.  The place was
well appointed but it lacked perfect strangers.  There was a stillness
to both places that made them unfit, or at least uninteresting, for
human habitation.  I am told that Celebration addressed this problem.
We shall see if SL can do the same. 

No people, no
anthropology.  I ported to places where there are lots of people, to a
dance party or a club.  Yikes!  I would end up talking to people who
are so preoccupied by political power or sexual congress, so limited in
their vocabulary, syntax, and dramaturgical interests, they might as
well be bots. 

This is not a well world.  This is a deeply tedious world.  No wonder people sign up only then to wander away.  Sexual motives can create social universe, but finally, and I think I can risk this assertion,
virtual sex is always going to be a pale imitation of real sex.  And
conversation preoccupied with power, well, this is uninteresting in the
real world.  And Second Life removes the contexts and consequences in which power plays out.  So who cares?

What
I need to make SL interesting is a coffee shop or a restaurant where
people just happen to congregate and just happen to give off those
streams of sound and sight that make life interesting.  I need people
to "happen" around me when I am in a virtual world.  (And I am
perfectly happy to reciprocate by "happening" around them.)  The thing
is I will never go to a virtual Starbucks for coffee.  I will never go
take my wife out to dinner at a virtual restaurant.  I will go for
person to person interaction and at the moment, this is just not very
interesting. 

The other big hit against Second Life is
that it sorts very badly.  I haven’t actually met anyone I find
illuminating.  I am not asking that my SL network feed my real world
network.  I am not as pragmatic as all that.  But I don’t want to step
down my standards of conversation and curiosity just because I am on
line.  That’s, surely, not what the virtual world is for.  If anything
it should allow me to reach out to more people in the world and
increase the chances that I will like the people I meet.  But this
never seems to happen.  I would like to hear about this one from the SL
supporters.  How many interesting people have you met in-world?

I
did have one happy encounter.  I stumbled into a magic garden of some
kind.  Eventually, I was approach by a rabbit who very kindly gave me a
tour of the garden and an introduction to the actual and social physics
of this world.  Blimey, now that’s the way to an anthropologist’s
heart.  Here was a nascent culture, that might someday become something
capable of supporting.  Who knows what might spring from these
beginnings.  It might just be a Pookie festival, but what if Second
Life were someday as productive as New York City in the 20th century?

Right
now, Second Life is not helping me sort.  In fact, there is even less
sorting in the virtual world than there is in the real world.  When
someone presents themselves as flaming cloud or a bunnie, I have some
measure of their imagination, but all other information is denied me. 

summing up

On
balance, there is in Second Life lots to like and lots to loathe.  But I believe two
things are clear.  We now have proof of concept.  And as Second Life supplies
real opportunities for engagement and sorting, this social world will
expand at pace, supplying in the longer term, every kind of cultural
innovation and commercial opportunity. 

References

Anonymous.
Economic Statistics.  Second Life.  Last Updated: Sunday, February 4,
2007. here. 

Coleman, Beth.  2007.  Second Life backlash: Clay Shirky blows up the spot.  Project Good Luck.  January 5, 2007.  here. 

Coleman, Beth.  2007.  Beyond Second Life Toward V-Economy.  Project Good Luck.  February 1. 2007. here.

Jenkins, Henry.  2007.  Second Thoughts on Second Life. Confessions of an Aca/Fan. here.   

Shirky, Clay.  2006.  Second Life: What are the real numbers?  Many2Many.  December 12, 2006. here. 

Shirky, Clay.  2007.  Second life, Games and Virtual Worlds.  Many 2 Many.  here

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Pat Crane for getting me started.   

New Yorkers! Be sure to stop by the Eyebeam/Interactive Architecture dot Org event tonight in Manhattan:

Organised by Ruairi Glynn of Interactive Architecture dot Org, Eyebeam is pleased to co-host, with the Bartlett School of Architecture, an evening of presentations on interactive architecture. Presenters will include Phil Ayres of Sixteen Makers, Eyebeam residents Carmen Trudell and Jennifer Broutin, Marek Walczak of MW2MW and David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang of the NYC architecture firm, The Living. Presenters will discuss their work for 15 minutes followed by a panel discussion moderated by Professor Stephen Gage of the Bartlett with a reception from 9-10pm.

It’s all going down at 540 W. 21st Street – if you go, tell Ruairi I said hello.

[Images: 1 and 2].

More info on the event; more info on architecture at the Bartlett.

“Astronomers have mapped the cosmic ’scaffold’ of dark matter upon which stars and galaxies are assembled,” the BBC reports. Producing the map “involved nearly 1,000 hours of observations with the Hubble Space Telescope.” But it was time well-spent: the map now “confirms that galaxy clusters are located within clumps of this invisible material. These clumps are connected via bridges of dark matter called filaments. The clumps and filaments form a loose network – like a web.”
We are thus surrounded by structures of the invisible.
In an interesting analogy, we read that “the challenge of mapping the Universe has been described as similar to mapping a city from night-time aerial snapshots showing only street lights.” But now they have the actual physical layout of the streets – or something like that.
Having said all this, let me admit to an outsider’s sense that either 1) the astronomers are wrong: there is no dark matter; dark matter is just a calculational artifact of the current model used to represent universal space (and, thus, this map actually shows something else); or 2) they’re right about all of it – except the use of the word matter, which is referentially misleading; it is not matter at all.

(Earlier: See Filaments of space-time, where you can read about “huge arc-bubbles of light colliding with themselves in glowing, superskeletal networks, filling space like translucent caulk”).

In their recent and immensely enjoyable book Tooling, New York-based architects Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch propose, among other things, a “10 mile spiral” that will “serve two civic purposes for Las Vegas”:

First, it acts as a massive traffic decongestion device… by adding significant mileage to the highway in the form of a spiral. The second purpose is less infrastructural and more cultural: along the spiral you can play slots, roulette, get married, see a show, have your car washed, and ride through a tunnel of love, all without ever leaving your car. It is a compact Vegas, enjoyed at 55 miles per hour and topped off by a towering observation ramp offering views of the entire valley floor below.

An aerial view of the spiral, in all its gas-guzzling glory, wound up like a snake on the periphery of the city:

[Image: Aranda/Lasch, from Tooling].

Drivers will enter this vertical labyrinth of concrete, approaching a whirligig-like compression of the desert horizon and gradually lifting off into the sky. It’s a kind of herniation of space through which you could theoretically drive forever. (Given enough gasoline).
The spiral itself is beautiful –

– and absurd. Its form was generated algorithmically as “a helix whose radius varies randomly as it climbs and then falls back down to the valley floor.” The structure’s “intersection points” are then located, acting as stress-sites “through which the structure’s loads are channeled to the ground.”
It’s an internally buttressed Futuro-Suprematist cathedral to cars.

[Image: Aranda/Lasch, from Tooling].

At the end of the book, Aranda/Lasch note that every project featured in Tooling was “constructed through simple steps, repeated over and over until something of substance was revealed”:

These steps are usually straightforward geometric transformations – short sets of rules that we develop – sometimes to build a custom tool that had not yet existed, but more often to better understand the forms we wish to make. Tapping the number-crunching power of the computer opens up new design possibilities and gives us the capacity to grow and proliferate structures that we otherwise could not, but probably more important is deciding when to curb their growth, cut their shape, or stop using them altogether.

In this regard, their architectural projects have much more in common with, say, the calculation-dependent music of Autechre than with anything explicitly spatial – unless that space is the coiling inward voids of conch shells, perhaps, or the strangely mathematical scaffolding of radiolaria.
At some point, Aranda/Lasch add, all the algorithmic tools they themselves used will be made available to anyone else who wants to explore them; to see if that’s happened yet, check this website in a few months’ time.

[Image: The spectacular glowing interior of that which has no outside: it's the 10 Mile Spiral from above, at night, lit from within by automobiles. Aranda/Lasch, from Tooling].

I can’t end this post, however, without quoting J.G. Ballard; it’s like a nervous tic, seeing so many roads – and out comes Concrete Island, Ballard’s now-classic novel about an architect trapped by a car crash in the “compulsory landscaping” of Greater London’s excess motorways: “In his aching head the concrete overpass and the system of motorways in which he was marooned had begun to assume an ever more threatening size. The illuminated route indicators rotated above his head, marked with meaningless destinations.”
The man falls prey to thirst, insomnia, delirium: “Gazing up at the maze of concrete causeways illuminated in the night air, he realized how much he loathed all these drivers and their vehicles.”
The man then searches for “some circuitous route through the labyrinth of motorways” – but finds none. He is trapped, a new Crusoe of roads, “alone in this forgotten world whose furthest shores were defined only by the roar of automobile engines… an alien planet abandoned by its inhabitants, a race of motorway builders who had long since vanished but had bequeathed to him this concrete wilderness.”
Leading me to wonder: what new futures of human experience could arise in the 10 Mile Spiral?

[Image: Aranda/Lasch, from Tooling].

(For more on Concrete Island, see BLDGBLOG’s own Concrete Island, in which those same quotations appear. Then, after you’ve express-ordered your own copy of Tooling – because any book with a chapter called “Computational Basketry” should be required reading – you can visit Benjamin Aranda’s and Chris Lasch’s work at the University of Pennsylvania’s Non-Linear Systems Organization, where they were recently research Fellows).