researching online communities

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• Gwyneth Member Posts: 66

  January 2007

  Answering your request for information, chris, demands a whole essay But I'll try to be brief, and point you to my blog, which is (mostly) a collection on essays on Second Life's society and economy anyway — hopefully, you'll get some insights from there.
  
  
  
  1. The Good Points of SL's Community
  
  

  • Diversity. There is not "a SL Community". Rather, there are several communities in SL, and you're happy to join which one you prefer. If you read this whole group, you'll see that the mature part of SL is very appealing (mostly to a younger generation). Well, you might find it incredible, but I haven't been to one of those "adult" areas for well over a year now — and that's all right. What appeals to the likes of me is not what appeals to others; Second Life allows everybody to have a space in there. There is no "groupthink" — you do what you want to do, and so do the others, each on each space — but, of course, it's a continuous world (not a fragmented one!) so you can happily travel from one place to another.
  • Open-mindedness and tolerance. People moslty respect other's views, even if they don't agree with it. Since there is space for everybody, it's pointless to judge upon others, or prevent others from having their fun. You just let them be how they want to be — on their community.
  • Creativity. This is the core of Second Life: create the community you want, not the one others want. Trekkies, BDSMers, poetry circles, and Elves can co-exist and participate together. And most likely they will!
  • Friendly. People staying in SL for a few months will feel a compulsion to help new users. Unlike MMORPGs which can be very competitive, SL is as competitive as you want it to be. There is quite a lot of volunteer work all over the place. And new users are usually encouraged, not shunned.
  • Pseudonimity (as opposed to anonymity!). You can present yourself like you wish to present yourself, and so does everybody else. You won't be ostracised for that.

  The Bad Points:

  • Fraud. As the world grows and grows, it's very easy for a few criminal minds to abuse other people's trust. This becomes more serious as real money is involved (see "moderation" below).
    
    
  • Reputation. Since it's so easy to create alternate accounts, you're obviously able to abuse the system, and then quickly cancel your account (and create a brand new one) before someone is able to stop you. Thus, there is no direct tie between you and your avatar's reputation. Some people can be the most loving and caring members of the community on one account, and wreak havok with a secondary account — nobody will know.
  • Lack of trust. Since there is no way to tie reputation to a person (as opposed to an account), you never know who you're really dealing with. Either the in-world tools guarantee a transaction (an object sale or a land sale), or you have to rely solely on trust. This is not easy to do when you consider a services industry. There are no ways to enforce binding contracts.

  2. Moderation
  
  
  
  Second Life is "almost unmoderated"; or, rather, it's self-moderated. There are a few guidelines (the Terms of Services and the Community Standards) that are, from time to time, enforced by Linden Lab employees. However, with 2.5 million accounts and a handful of Linden employees, this is a daunting task, specially if thousands of abuse reports (violations of the ToS and CS) are filed every day and have to be manually reviewed. This simply doesn't work.
  
  
  
  Rather, each community attempts to "moderate itself". The last resort is banning someone from your land. This is really the only thing that you can do. It's not much, but there is no "real" alternative, although many groups have tried (and mostly failed) to establish SL-wide "codes of conduct" and similar rules. They are impossible to enforce technically, just socially, so their impact is not huge.
  
  
  
  3. The "rules" are just one, the Golden Rule — "who has the gold, makes the rules" No, seriously, Second Life doesn't have "rules" at all. You have to abide by the Terms of Service and Community Standards, and that's all. You're on your own beyond that — it's up to you to do whatever you please
  
  
  
  4. There is a rather steep learning curve. Unlike, say, learning how to use Microsoft Word (you open it up, and you immediately know how to type and save documents), where knowledge is built from small, discrete steps, Second Life needs several hours until you master it enough to be able to enjoy it. This is mostly getting familiar with the interface and what is being offered.
  
  
  
  Once you have mastered that — about a week using it 1-2 hours per day should be enough! — comes the next step. What do you want to do in Second Life? If you want to be a master architect, and have neither the training, the skill, or the talent to do so, it will be a next-to-impossible task. On the other hand, anyone familiar enough with 3D modelling tools will be able to pick Second Life and in a few hours will be creating fantastic objects.
  
  
  
  On the "services area" — the one where you can indeed earn more money! — it's even harder. Someone wishing to become a real estate agent will take months or years to learn the whole business of real estate. It's as hard to learn as the real estate business in, well, real life.
  
  
  
  Thus, the correct approach to Second Life is just thinking like it is the World-Wide Web. How hard is it to "dwell" in the Web? Well, learning how to use Google to search for things is easy (thus, it's rather easy to find interesting things in SL as well). If what you want with the Web is to get access to people with similar ideas — well, that's easy in Second Life as well. If you're just looking for entertainment in the Web (think about the people watching YouTube for hours!), that's also very very easy in Second Life. In general, all the tasks that are easy on the Web, are also easy on SL — sometimes easier, sometimes a bit harder, but they're roughly at the same level of difficulty.
  
  
  
  Then you have the next step: becoming a content producer, and not only a consumer of other people's content. In the Web, this means learning how to set up a blog or a page on MySpace. In Second Life, this means renting or buying "land" (a metaphor for "3D space where you can drop your own objects for others to view"). You can also get all sort of free things like houses and furniture, or buy them from other people, and start decorating your own, personal space, as you'd like. Again, this is easy — but it'll take time. You should compare it to the time required to, say, setup a "standard" blog, and one where you look for plugins, tweak with the HTML, or even buy a Javascript menu for a few US$ just not to waste time in developing your own, and make your page look nicer. In Second Life, the same applies — it's your own "3D blog", so to speak, and the time you spend on it is equivalent to the time you need to set up your own blog/MySpace page.
  
  
  
  The next level, of course, is building your own home — from scratch — and learn how to program things like doors opening, interactive furniture, etc. Once more we can look at the blog analogy. This means writing your own content management system for a website, and doing your own HTML/CSS plus images on Photoshop. A more thorough knowledge is needed for doing that — and, compared to blogging tools (or social sites) where you click on a button and "things happen", if you're creating your own content management system, be prepared to take a lot of time learning about programming, markup languages, special effects in Javascript, and all those things. It's not for the "amateur" — although many amateurs can start from an existing tool (say, WordPress) and tweak it for their own purposes, extend it, and add to it.
  
  
  
  It's exactly the same in Second Life. Building a home is great fun — but to achieve photo-realistic effects, it takes a lot of talent, patience, time, and knowledge. Still, many people are able to work from existing content and adapt; and learn how things are built, and replicate them; after several weeks or even months (practice leads perfection!) you might finally understand enough to create convincing structures. Not all "top architects" in Second Life are, indeed, real life architects or designers; actually, the huge majority are very talented and creative people who have mastered the in-world building tools. But — it's not for everybody, just like not everybody wants to create their own blogging engine, and prefers to start from existing ones.
  
  
  
  Second Life, of course, is far more than "building things". Just like the Web Internet celebrities, for instance, might not have a clue on the kind of technology used by, say, Google's Blogger — this still allows them to be read by the millions just because they provide insight, good opinions, consistent analysis, and excellent feedback on major issues. You can be a technology expert without understanding exactly the details of certain technological tools. "Dwelling" on the Web successfully — becoming a focal point where people from all the world converge — does not always mean "technological" skills, but rather more social skills like charisma and intelligence.
  
  
  
  Exactly the same happens in Second Life. You can be a "community leader"  without being a top programmer or a top builder; in fact, most of the "community leaders" are neither. They're good at socialising and establishing networks of social contacts. How easy is that? Well, compared to "real life", there is an advantage and a disadvantage — coming from pseudonymity. People will ostracise others much less — and disregard completely your skin's colour, age, sex, nationality, or religion, since you can look whatever you like —  but trust is harder to establish sometimes. Someone with social skills will, however, be able to compensate for the pseudonimity by establishing good and solid trust relationships. How hard are these? Well, seeing that so many people with Asperger's and similar social disfunctions are able to function normally inside the synthetic world of Second Life, I would say that social bonding is, in spite of everything, much easier in Second Life.
  
  
  
  You see how hard it is to answer your questions! They're too vague. Imagine that someone would ask you: "How easy is it to dwell in the World-Wide Web?" These days, the question almost doesn't make any sense — most people don't even remember a time without the WWW, and so, we can assume that "it is very easy indeed, or a billion people wouldn't be using it". I tend to agree. But remember how the reverse was claimed back in 1993! ("This new Web thingy is so hard that only computer scientists will ever be using it").
  
  
  
  Thus, it will be interesting to read your research in a decade or so, when everybody in the world will be familiar with the concept of synthetic worlds — and will use it as often as they use the WWW these days

  
  "I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country."
  -- Philip "Linden" Rosedale, interview to Wired, 2004-05-08