Second Life the Future of the Internet?

Ryan McNutt, neither a great fan of Second Life nor a closed minded individual on the subject, is a Public Relations worker at Dalhousie University. Yesterday, he published an interesting post called …in which McNutt ponders Second Life, Virtual Worlds and the Future of the Internet. Ryan begins the post with information about an one-day intensive course in social media marketing and Web 2.0, put on by the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada, presented by Mitch Joel of Twist Image.

Ryan recalled my attention to the “Uncanny Valley” theory, a 1970 hypothesis dealing with robotics, and tied it to Second Life and other virtual worlds.

The Uncanny Valley theory basically states that humans will be empathetic toward the advancement of robots until the robots reach the evolutionary state of “almost human”; at which point humans will become repulsed by them. The closer the robot becomes to actually being human the weirder and stranger the little differences will seem. The theory goes on to hypothesizes that once a robot and a human become completely indistinguishable from one another, a positive relationship will once again occur.

Ryan questions “what is going to happen as these virtual worlds like Second Life become more and more realistic, losing their fantastical elements and becoming a functional replication of our actual reality?” hmmm… plenty of room for thought in that question.

Could a significant part of Second Life’s churn rate (those who sign up but quickly leave) be because the representation of Second Life has gotten to close to real life, and become to strange an event for a majority of users?

I have always simply given the churn rate over to the steep learning curve of Second Life, but now think Ryan’s question is a fair one to ponder. “What if the real reason people don’t come back to Second Life is that most people are not sold on the idea of virtual worlds to begin with?”, asks Ryan.

There could be truth about the Second Life churn rate in both the learning curve and Ryan’s connection of Virtual Worlds to the “Uncanny Valley” theory. Unquestionably something worth pondering.

Ryan went on to end his post with the following:

Why is it that our concept of “the future of the Internet” is a virtual approximation of real life? Why are we talking about taking the things we can already do in real life and placing them into the digital one? Is this really the best that we can come up with? I don’t buy it. The Internet is the most revolutionary and exciting undiscovered country in human history, and something tells me that its possibilities stretch much further than the narrow, reductionist perspective that virtual worlds impose upon them

In dealing with the “Uncanny Valley” theory, I would be willing to wager that if we suddenly discovered that indistinguishable human-like robots were walking among us today without the benefit of watching those robots evolve — there would be little chance of a positive relationship taking place.

Less than a century ago space travel was extremely taxing on the normal humans imagination with few caring to read about the possibility. Today it is an excepted everyday thought of an overwhelming majority of people.

We have to take one step at time Ryan. As with Science Fiction, if you get to far out — you fraction the people into smaller groups. Sure, there is a hardcore group of science fiction readers who enjoy the stretching of the imagination to the breaking point, but there is a much larger group that will read and enjoy science fiction only if it does not tax their imagination to heavily. One little step at a time Ryan.