Week 6 - Second Life Podcast

There are a lot of topics in the course that make you really think or do a double-take. This podcast caught me by surprise a few times. I could not believe that there was someone at Kelley who was so into using Second Life as a productivity tool that they are writing books about it and seen as a leading authority of the uses of Second Life. I truly thought Second Life was just another gaming application that was similar to The Sims, but more replication of yourself in a virtual world. I think the point was brought up that many users of Second Life are using it for the entertainment aspect. Before hearing this podcast, I would have thought that there was no other purpose of Second Life other than entertainment.

What also blew me away was that Second Life wasn't so nerdy as it could be useful for everyone. Well, it still might be pretty nerdy. 12 million people worldwide isn't a huge percentage of the population. It is probably still thought of as nerdy. I am remin

ded about The Office episode where Dwight uses Second Life a lot and then others in the office join to mock him. In the end they get kind of hooked too.

The biggest question that stands out there for me is how does everyone actually interact in a virtual world to conduct business, for example. If everyone starts to gravitate toward using Second Life as this place to have conferences, meetings, social gatherings, etc., then won't there be other companies that want to join in on the action? How do you standardize a virtual environments for those participating in Second Life to interact with the people who are logged on through a different virtual environment? If a new company creates a better Second Life, there will be difficulty in truly interacting with anyone anywhere. Take cars for an example. There are many different makes and models of cars, but there are standards that must be met for safety, usability, and maintainability reasons. Anyone who can drive a Honda can also drive a Ford, or a Volkswagen, etc. I am not saying that this isn't possible, but other than Microsoft's almost monopolistic domination of OS software in the 1990s, there are many differences and even complete incompatibility issues with software even today. Second Life would have to expand greatly (have hundreds of millions of users) and set standards for other software / virtual environments to interact simultaneously in order to make the vision expressed in the podcast come to fruition.