Second Life’s brightly illustrated world often seems like a game, even though there’s no purpose to the world other than to enjoy it. Like in a game, real-world propriety fits here as much as unabashed honesty does in an online chat room, which is to say it doesn’t. Second Life’s reliable goofiness is a big part of its charm. After all, who wants to get serious when you’re talking to an elf, or when your eyes are three times the size of your nose? Linden Lab bans avatars it suspects of harassment, and owners of SL property can limit visitors to those on a guest list, but these actions are still relatively rare. Which makes serious political dialogue tough. As one blogger, Nathan Weinberg, posted on January 17, days after the Front National debacle, “You can’t hold political discourse [in Second Life] because someone could drop a giant virtual poop on your stage.”
But Nancy Scola (a/k/a “Nancy Mandelbrot”), a freelance journalist who helped arrange Mark Warner’s in-world appearance in August 2006 when he was considering running for president, thinks pixelated politics will continue despite the opportunity for virtual idiocy. Scola recalls one avatar’s bizarre conduct during a recent talk in SL given by US Court of Appeals judge Richard Posner.
“As [Posner] was speaking somebody turned themselves into a giant wooden cube and was running back and forth across the stage,” she says. “He did it a couple of times and everybody started ignoring him and he just kind of sat down. The first time you hold a political event, you’re probably going to get people running around in their underwear or what have you. But people learn how to sort of architect around it. The thrill of that wears off.”
Could political organizing in the land of genital shopping malls eventually affect the real world?
“My short answer for anything regarding Second Life is I have no idea,” says Scola, who in 2006 authored the article
“Avatar Politics: The Social Applications of Second Life” for the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, in Washington DC. “One of the things that Second Life needs in order for political activism to work is critical mass and you’re starting to see that; just more and more people are jumping in. You can actually draw people in by interest rather than where they happen to be located. There are plenty of creative people who are going to figure out interesting political ways to use Second Life. I don’t think we’ve really even begun to see what that is yet.”
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Sara Donnelly: sdonnelly@phx.com
