Second Life

1.       How does the tool relate to the topic of the week?

The tool we used this week was Second Life. It relates to our topic of the week (cyber culture/virtual communities) as a cyber culture is a culture that has emerged or is emerging from the use of computer networks for communication, entertainment, and business, and a virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific social media in order to pursue mutual interests. Second Life allows anyone to sign up and interact with individuals who have common interests.

2.       What function does the tool serve?

This tool serves as a virtual community as it is a social network that allows people to interact with each other whether they have mutual interests or not. There are many different world destinations people can enter to find people with mutual interests or just people to talk to.

3.       What did you find most interesting about the tool?

I thought the most interesting part of the tool was changing the avatar into whatever you wanted to be. There were so many different options between humans, animals, vampires, or robots then you could actually go into the different destinations and retrieve free clothes to change your avatars appearance to how ever you want it to be.

4.       What did you find most challenging?

The thing I found most challenging about Second Life was how to fit in with all the older users. Everyone in each destination seemed to know what they were doing and it was hard to follow along if there were set rules for each destination as sometimes they would kick you out if you didn’t belong. Some destinations required certain clothing as others seemed to just be people that have already met on Second Life that did not want you to be a part of their group.

5.       How does the tool improve or complicate communication?

I think this tool complicates and improves communication depending on who you are talking to in Second Life as some people want to help new users and others completely ignore them. It helps improve communication in that universities are looking into using Second Life to teach and in the future I think it could also become a great marketing tool as they have lots of space to put advertisements. I think it complicates communication in that people do have their own lingo on Second Life with words like rezzing and slurl. It also can be all anonymous as people can make their avatar actually look like themselves (which is never exactly alike) or they can choose to be a vampire, animal or robot.

6.       What is your critique of your experience?

I thought using Second Life was fun, but it just seems like you need to be really into it to know what you’re doing and who to talk to, to make the experience worthwhile as not many of us had people come forward and talk to us instead we had to go talk to them. I am more into Sims where you are able to control mostly everyone in the game. It was fun, but I would not use it daily.