Journal #7: Trends of Social Networking

After reading what other individuals thought about Second Life, I found it interesting how they communicate with one another. Mark Stephens quoted Byron Reeves a Stanford University professor by saying, “ People respond to interactive technology on social and emotional levels much more than we ever thought.” This comment by Reeves makes perfect sense as to why people make virtual avatars. And to think that a virtual world economy is doing better than the real economy is absolutely astonishing. To further elaborate on this thought, our economy is global figuratively, and is laterally perplexing. The way that users actually feel the need to keep the economy going in a virtual world would a part of Maslow’s law fulfilling love/belonging. With a social network, you have to feel the sense of belonging to a group or organization. In Second Life, you belong to a group of virtual users who feel the need to have a virtual avatar.

The reason people play Second Life is because they fill their lack of social obligation by adopting an alternative lifestyle. And Mark Stephen agrees with this point when he said, “Social worlds are socially driven systems in which a player tries to achieve social position under emergent rule sets.” Also, in other articles that I read, most of them dealt with businesses that wanted to advertise their business through a social network. From a business aspect, this is very important. This is how you gain both new followers, and show others that there is no limitation as to how businesses can convey their messages to designated audiences. Also very few wanted to have live video and audio feed. With this form of communication, select individuals felt that they would be able see and hear the other persons, and identify who they are. In this way, two or more individuals would be able to feel closer to one another. However, there is also a sense of anonymity that goes along with video and audio use. Users of Second Life lose that sense of privacy.

The social aspect that drives Second Life is the sense of depth. What I mean by “depth” is the environment that plays an integral part in Second Life. Some of the users commented on the fact that Second Life as it is now, is not like it used to be. Back when Second Life first started many of the early developers were not as knowledgeable with the use of HTML as they are today. However, users are now more erudite with their utilization of this virtual world as a medium in which to get a broader audience. Especially since the developers are going in a new direction with Second Life.

The future of Second Life looks very promising. I read that Linden Labs is going to make Second Life open source. This is especially unique in the sense that users will be able to design this application in ways that they see fit. Users can change the code in the game, which will give them limitless options as to how they view Second Life both as a user and also as a developer. Linden Labs are also going to allow users outside of their network to plug up their own private servers to the grid. Subsequently, the company feels that they need to stress the point to “professionalize” the way that businesses conduct themselves “in world.” Mark Stephen said, “Evidently they thought they were selling products to humans. But they weren’t they were selling to avatars. And that’s a different market with different needs, desires, and fashion sense.”

The way I interpret the gaming culture is that it is an avenue for growth both for corporate businesses and individual talent. There are many individuals “in world” that have a lot of talent that would be beneficial to both small businesses and large corporations. And that is why companies tend to open their businesses virtually in Second Life so that they can tap into this new market and gain new talent.