Meanwhile, back in the world of bubble media, USA Today has discovered the virtual world Second Life complete with a fawning profile of Linden Lab founder and CEO Philip Rosedale. It’s an acceptable history lesson for those new to the topic, but it barely mentions any of the bad news (hackers, population questions, business model questions) and goes heavy on pointless detail (the Linden Lab cafeteria, we learn, is “funky” and “ragged” — and “half-eaten Costco-size bags of chips and bowls of fruit lie on bare tables”), frequent cliched appellations (“king of the alter egos,” the tech celebrity du jour,” “builder of the Metaverse”), and enough overstatements to fill a press release, which it resembles.
How important is Second Life? Well, according to USA Today, “It is becoming so vital that politicians are campaigning there, bands such as Duran Duran are giving concerts…” Wow. Duran Duran. Perhaps Stryper was unavailable. The piece ends with the usual cliched question: “Can Rosedale take this early lead and run with it?” You guessed it: Only time will tell.
If I seem cranky here, it’s not to put down Rosedale (who’s worthy of respect and admiration) or Second Life (which can be fun). But, fellow journalists, please. Clay Shirky and others have been skeptical about this service’s possibilities, but it’s far from the norm. The tone of this and so many other pieces is, frankly, starstruck.
Sometimes when I visit Second Life, it’s so empty that it’s easy to wonder whether the only avatars there are those maintained by marketers. The latest virtual world marketing story is from virtual world marketers Electric Sheep, which put together a Machinima ad for a CBS sitcom that showed up during one of the 10,000 Super Bowl pregame shows on the network. The press release says the spot, created inside Second Life, is “the first machinima advertising promo for a major TV series,” which is such a minor achievement that at press time no major news outlet, not even USA Today, had picked up the press release. At a time when it seems as if every tiny activity inside Second Life is grounds for a news story, this may be a sign that some real journalist standards are being applied to coverage of this virtual world.
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