Second life as "YASNS"

Danah Boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Her research focuses on how American youth use networked publics for sociable purposes. Recently, Danah has focused on the role that social network sites like MySpace and Facebook play in everyday teen interactions and relations. She is interested in how these environments alter the structural conditions in which teens operate, forcing them to manage complex dynamics like interacting before invisible audiences, managing context collisions, and negotiating the convergence of public and private life.

She has received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Brown University and a master's degree in sociable media from MIT Media Lab. She has worked as an ethnographer and social media researcher for various corporations, including Intel, Tribe.net, Google, and Yahoo! She wil be going to work for Microsoft Research in January 2009. She also created and managed a large online community for V-Day, a non-profit organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide. She has advised numerous other companies, sits on corporate, education, and non-profit advisory boards, and regularly speaks at industry conferences and events.



Throughout Danah’s research on Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship we can see how she describes “social networking sites”. According to her SNS’s must work as:

1. “Web-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system,
2. Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection,
3. View and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.


The definitions above make use of web 2.0 tools and allow users to set up their own individual profiles. To varying degrees these services allow users to indicate a list of friends, join groups, contact other members and explore member profiles within the network. I think it is fair to say that all three platforms are working to build online communities. The three platforms share a clear interest to mobilize people towards the common objective - to help people in developing countries - yet this is where in my opinion the social networking falls short.

Now by taking what Danah states about what a Social Network Site is, we could easily apply it on Second life, since it is a web-based service that allows individuals to build a public profile within a bounded system articulate other users, and view and traverse the list of connections. Danah is clearly interested on youth and how they interact through the web, what draw’s them to make these profiles, is it just to find friends that already exist in their physical every day life? Or, are they searching for something new, she even looks at the psychological aspects of a teenager joining an SNS platform, she gives an example of a little girl being shy, not very social, feeling that she is not living up to the standards to be noticed by her fellow classmates therefore she finds a way that would make her attract others children to become her friend, she finds comfort by uploading interesting pictures on the web to draw attention and make new friends.
What raises my curiosity is that how can a person that is so talented and focused on youth, ignore the fact that a virtual world like Second life could actually help younger people, by creating themselves in a virtual world and having the freedom to socialize and learn so many things through it. Personally I believe that Second Life has a lot to offer if approached correctly.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2006/12/15/on_being_virtua.html

She states in one of her postings:
“Lately, I’ve become very irritated by the immersive virtual questions I’ve been getting. In particular, "will Web3.0 be all about immersive virtual worlds?" Clay's post on Second Life reminded me of how irritated i am by this. I have to admit that i get really annoyed when techno-futurists fetishism Stephenson- visions of virtuality. Why is it that every 5 years or so we re-instate this fantasy as the utopian end-all be-all of technology? (Remember VRML? That was fun.)

Maybe I’m wrong; maybe I’ll look back twenty years ago and be embarrassed by my lack of foresight. But honestly, i don't think we're going virtual.”


I find Danah’s work really interesting and I admire her for what she has accomplished until now, but I would like to take a moment and criticise on the statement above. If more talented and dedicated researchers like herself actually put their theories and findings through their research and applied them on virtual worlds like Second life, then an actual healthy community could be implemented more easily and efficiently, the nuisance for education through the web would become much easier, and maybe even more self-confidence would be developed.

She talks about the integration of online and offline communities, but I don’t think she has actually realised that SL is already implementing that, many Universities have gone already virtual. http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life:_Universities_and_Private_Islands.

Nevertheless shifting our focus back to teenagers, on February 14th 2005 another version of second life was introduced to the public “Teens Second Life” this was structured for people aged 13-17 years old. Teen’s second life is different in many ways than Second life itself, such differences can be seen in access, age, demographics, land, content, economy and performance, so it is an actual community that is focusing on a healthy virtual youth environment, furthermore Linden Lab allows educators to actually set up projects on islands for middle schools and secondary education. The educational projects in Teen Second Life fall into two categories; those that are accessible to all residents of Teen Second Life (public projects), and those accessible to teens associated with a particular project in 'real life' (private projects). These private projects are most often inaccessible to Teen Second Life residents.
I believe what is so powerful about Second life than most of the other SNS’s on the web is the fact that it comes with a concept of “place”, being able to see each other and interact in different environments together with other avatars simultaneously results in a common set of visual references that make the overall cultural experience even more powerful.

WEB 2.0+SECOND LIFE

WEB 2.0 consists of Cooperative Behavior, Education, Information Storage and Retrieval, Interpersonal Relations, Organizational Innovation, Social Behavior, User-Computer Interface, Online Systems, collaboration, knowledge, participation and community.

According to Best, the characteristics of Web 2.0 are: rich user experience, user participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards and scalability. Further characteristics, such as openness, freedom and collective intelligence by way of user participation, can also be viewed as essential attributes of Web 2.0.

Taking the above into account we might as well say, it has many definitions. Basically, the term encloses the idea of the rapid reproduction of interconnectivity and interactivity of web-delivered content. “Tim O’Reilly considers Web 2.0 as business embracing the web as a platform and using its strengths, for example global audiences. Building applications and services around the unique features of the Internet, as opposed to expecting the Internet to suit as a platform (effectively “fighting the Internet”).

Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. Users can actually build on the interactive facilities of “Web 1.0″ to provide “Network as platform” computing, allowing users to run software-applications entirely through a browser. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data. These sites may have an “Architecture of participation” that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. This stands in contrast to very old traditional websites, the sort which limited visitors to viewing and whose content only the site’s owner could modify. Web 2.0 sites often feature a rich, user-friendly interface based on Ajax, OpenLaszlo, Flex or similar rich media.
So in order to break down the analysis here web 2.0 is basically internet that relies on its users to come together, a network based on participation and encouraging it by letting the users take control. The more users interacting on the web the more value it gets.

Now taking into consideration the above as a whole and applying it on “Second Life” we could say that it is a web 2.0 application even though I feel that its becoming a bit more than a 2.0 app.

When you first join, you are taken to Prelude Island to acquire some basic skills. The tutorial process is relatively lengthy, but that time is needed in order to get comfortable with the relatively complex controls.

In Second Life, your avatar is completely customizable, with myriad variations of skin tone, eye color, hair type, clothing, shoes, and so on. And you can make changes to the world itself: You can purchase some land and build a house. Building in Second Life relies on a series of menu-based scripts that take some time to master. Although commands will be familiar to anyone who has used a basic design or graphics program, they aren’t quite point-and-click.

After finishing your time at Prelude Island, you are transported to a standard starting area. Here you can check which of your buddies are online and move through the world by walking, teleporting, or flying.

Although you can create weapons and do battle in special areas of Second Life, that is not a major draw. The game is designed for a more sophisticated virtual citizen, one who would be more interested in building a 3-D replica of the of their company or even famous towers.
Therefore we can easily say that second life is a 3D virtual world application where people can interact, exchange ideas, exchange information, build and make their own facilities, learn, meet people from all over the world and last but not least open your mind to new things.

delicious.gif Bookmark on del.icio.us.

Web 1.0 Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication

secondlife fun :)

Second Life

I was browsing into sites and checking out some new media news and what’s going on around the globe… but I keep on coming across this subject of “second life” whom of which I find it very controversial and it really tempts me to keep on looking into this subject more and more. Second life is apparently an internet based virtual world developed by Linden lab. It came to international attention through mainstream news media between the years 2006-2007.Its a free downloadable program and it is actually called the Second Life Viewer therefore briefly what users do is they interact with eachother through motional avatars providing them with an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Therefore what residents can do is meet other residents, explore, socialize , participate in different activities and even create and trade items. Some people might just see it as a game but if we take a step back and look a bit more in depth on how much power and impact this kind of world can have on us in the near future it is amazing and at the same time scary. So a nice way to start on this research could be the “SWOT” that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Hoping to get some opinions and parallel to that find my path to study more about second life

What is new media?

Since I am going to be Blogging about a lot of new media subjects I decided the first thing that I would post should be a small introduction about what is new media so that it can be easier to follow even for people that are not so familiar with the subject. So… what is New Media??
Can we actually answer this question by being 100% right? Personally I don’t think so. Nevertheless we can start by saying that “the idea of new media captures both the development of unique forms of digital media, and the remarking of more traditional media forms to adopt and adapt to the new media technologies. Convergence captures development futures from old media to new media”.