Josh Fouts
USC Center on Public Diplomacy executive director Josh Fouts guest blogs about a piece by technology innovator and assessor, Clay Shirky.
Shirky does a bit of a take down on the latest craze to hit Businessweek, the Economist and many many other mainstream outlets: Entertaining ourselves in Virtual Worlds for fun and profit.
For those of you who don't know what I'm alluding to or are confused by the above links, I'm talking about Second Life. For those who haven't heard, Second Life is a self-proclaimed Virtual World. A 3-D place you can go (via your computer) to reinvent yourself as that 3-D alterego you've always wanted to be, reimagine your life, buy property, build a new house.
Thanks to the publicity of late and the extraordinary marketing talent of Second Life's makers, LindenLabs, according to the Second Life website, new subscribers to Second Life have skyrocketed to well over a million. Right on the heels of this announcement Second Life's first land developer announced that she had made in excess of $1 million selling virtual real estate. That's right. People pay real money to own land only accessible via your computer.
What I'm interested in are the numbers. Are we really entertaining ourselves to death buying and selling real estate? That's what Shirky gets at in his December 12 essay, "Second Life: What are the real numbers" that there's plenty of spin in the data.
Quote: "There's nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived."
I'm a big fan of the video game and virtual world trend. Heck, I even lead a research project exploring its intersection in the foreign policy world. I'm also consistently impressed with what Second Life has become. It's a great diversion to explore where technology and entertainment are going. But I think it's worth a healthy dose of skepticism to clarify how much we're entertaining ourselves and how many of us are actually doing it that way.
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