How to live in a pervasively networked world. What happens when 1st life meets second life?
What is 1st/2nd life? They’re different, but in what way?
1st: material contingencies. Digital data owes its life to material stuff. So our 2nd life has a material basis, and we should be mindful of it.
This material basis is a debt (some sort of HR, material, expended energy debt too).
Online exists thanks to offline. An avatar consumes 1,752kWh per year. That is a bit less energy than a real person (2,436kWh) (cf. Nicolas Carr’s Blog, 05.12.06, see blog)
Also a debt to the sedentary body sitting in front of our computer screen. steph-note: yes, my upcoming post “On the Road to Being a Healthier Geek”…
There are critical externalities to our SL existence. 1st life doesn’t reboot when the system crashes.
How could we be reminded of these externalities in our 2nd Life? Bridge FL to SL, and get the best of both? Can we make SL worlds that take those material contingencies seriously? Where do we start? Playful reminders. Motion, time distance.
- Wii: motion.
- Animal Crossing: time.
- Teku Teku Angel: distance.
How do you account for your second life?
Update 11.02.2007: Check out Julian’s post about this topic.
Good question 🙂
I have been to SL, like many other people, I imagine, to “have a look”, and try to understand. After several hours, I was more or less asking myself the same questions.
How can we invest so much time and money in something which is not only “only” a second life, but definitively a poorer one ? As long as computers cannot generate feelings and sensations, smells and tastes, SL will definitively be poorer.
I leave between two worlds, let’s say I already have two FL 🙂 one which is the highly technical where I surf, blog, and even spend some time in SL. The other one is Morocco, and I’m regularly with the nomads, people who don’t even know what electricity is, and haven’t the faintest idea of a computer.
I’m not joking… once we met a family with a kid around 4, and he was scared like hell, because that was the first time he was climbing in a car (ok he get used to it quite quickly, but that’s just to show the technological gap).
I already ask myself how do I account for my second FL in my first one 🙂
Morocco is on second life (actually that’s what brought me there at the beginning), or just a very small part of it, quite iconic btw. But there will never ever be a nomad there :).
The power we have to make a world look like we would dream it, without old people, diseases, poverty, constraints, is a very inreresting and questionning experience.