Why Second Life CAN be taken seriously

Read an article that had my blood pressure rising, by Nathan Weinberg on why Second Life can’t be taken seriously. His argument, to save you reading the article, seems to be that because it is possible to protest and interrupt “without accountability” it can never offer significant real-world value beyond entertainment.

It’s an odd argument. It assumes that there is some qualitative difference between people in the real world and people in Second Life; as though people in Second Life are somehow not… people. It assumes that there is somehow more control in real life, than there is in Second Life, and that protest in Second Life is somehow worth less than it is in real life.

It is true that there are many more possibilities in Second Life. In real life, if you want to protest, you can write to your local representative, assuming you live in a democracy (or I suppose, even if you don’t, although the consequences may be different if you don’t) and you can walk up and down with a protest banner outside your form of parliament. If you wish to risk arrest, you can throw eggs or other harmless but messy substances at people who incur your displeasure. In extreme cases, you can blow up yourself, or other people. I don’t believe in violence against people whether perpetrated by state or individual, but people do those things in real life, every day.
In SL, the possibilities are pretty endless. You can create spawning objects, photoshop pictures of pretty land barons with large…attachments to send out as particles, shoot people, orbit them and generally make a nuisance of yourself. I should point out that you will, eventually, get banned if you keep that sort of behaviour up, in case anyone sees this as a call to penis-spawning griefing.

What Mr Weinberg assumes is that these are a sort of thoughtless griefer vandalism, disruptive to discussion and debate. In fact, in my experience, the issues that have mobilised big protests, have been important issues. Even while I am defending people’s rights to say things I totally disagree with, I may also be applauding the actions of groups of residents who have protested things like the setting up of a Nazi concentration camp in SL, the provision of unverified accounts, and the production of a creation-copying script.

People in real life are apathetic to the point of total inertia. I have waited for people in the UK to get angry about the things which have happened here — the destruction of the best postal system in the world, the selling off of our national water system, the bankrupting of our National Health System. Generally people wait for things to affect them personally before they take to the streets.

I think it is a good thing that people in SL react, respond, make it clear what they think is acceptable and not acceptable. The Anshe Chung penis-griefing incident may have been pure vandalism, but seemed to many who know the background and of Ms Chung and her much-spun history in SL, to be a frank comment on her wish to distance herself from her escort past, by removing all references to it from wikipedia and other places. People in SL are generally generous and tolerant, I think, but they hate spam, and they hate hypocrisy, and they let you know it.

What I love about SL is that what I learn here applies to the real world. Initially I made the mistake of thinking that a place where anything is possible, where men live as women and women live as men, and where you can’t be sure that anything anyone says is true, made the world different from the real world. Experience has shown me that many of the apparent differences are an illusion. People are not what they seem in the real world too. People are open and honest or deceiving and dishonest, and you may not be able to tell the difference.

When my children attended school, I used to spend quite a lot of time complaining about the children who were disruptive in class. There was one in particular who often led to the class being evacuated as he threw furniture around and attacked the teachers. After I withdrew them from school, and began to learn about the dynamics of classrooms and schools, I began to realise that this child had been expressing himself pretty strongly for several years, and no one was listening. In school, his behaviour was seen as a failure of parenting, an inability to conform and comply with instructions and to respect authority.

The school wasn’t able to learn from his behaviour, or to communicate over it, because they had absolute standards of conformity that he wasn’t able to respect. But there is another way of looking at it: that he was telling them in no uncertain terms, that his life in school was making him very, very unhappy. He wasn’t expressing that verbally, but the mssage was very clear. They just didn’t have the freedom to hear it and act upon it, as education is compulsory from 5-16 in the UK, and unless your parents learn that home education is legal, that means school.

My experience with learning to see things a different way in real life, informs my Second Life experience too. I feel reluctant to dismiss the things which happen as “just griefing” or “just vandalism” and try to look beyond that to the underlying message. In general, where protests have been big and protracted, I find it hard to feel that there is no justification for them. Usually, if they gain widespread support and are sustained, this isn’t the case.

What sets SL aside, is the ability to be whomever you feel you are, and to express yourself without fear or favour. Thus people who are intimidated by political issues in real life and feel they have no real voice, will grab the opportunity to express themselves when faced with a very similar issue in SL. I think that’s a good thing. If people see that they can make a difference in SL, maybe they will feel motivated to try to make a difference in real life.

SL is an opportunity, a place for exploration and experiment, and it offers as many chances for learning to your average right-wing racist as it does to teenage griefers. Learning to use its possibilities is something that challenges us all. Maybe we can all become better people by using it.