Second Life

Last time I griped about Facebook. This time I shall sing the praises of Second Life.

Second Life is an MMO-RPG, minus the G. Instead of being a Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game, it's a Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing something else. Because it's not a game.

So what is it, if not a game? That is a good question, and one that I'm not comfortable answering. In a way, it's a social networking system like Facebook, but the ways that Second Life is being used are so much more interesting and expansive than Facebook, it's kind of silly to put them in the same category. Like roller-skates and space shuttles, maybe. Both help to get you places, but it's disingenuous to put them in the same box.

Second Life is a giant virtual world. It's populated by real people from the real world, who build avatars to represent themselves. They are able to use these avatars to interact with other people via their avatars. At the most basic level, this is a fancy 3-D graphical way to chat with others online.

However, there is another level to the system that makes it considerably more interesting. Second Life allows users to create structures that will allow them to interact with others in ways appropriate to their interests. For instance, one could meet other people by building a club or public square (or by visiting one already built by others.) Likewise, one could worship in an exact replica of St. Peter's or the Taj Mahal, or visit a memorial created to remember the victims of a tragedy such as the Virginia Tech shootings.

There are less “public service” types of structures a user could create. If you are an artist, you could create an art gallery or hall to show off high-resolution scans of your own work, with the ultimate goal of gaining some measure of fame, or even with the hope of selling some of your real or virtual works. Several businesses have set up shops in an attempt to expand their websites into virtual physical spaces. In these places, users can have their avatars buy real, physical objects that will be sent to their real houses. However, many places also sell virtual versions of the same objects, so that avatars can buy virtual furniture for their virtual homes.

These are all perfectly acceptable ways to use Second Life, but where it really shines is in its ability to be used as a collaborative space. Many schools and businesses are using Second Life as sandboxes for projects. There are particular aspects of the system that allow users to collaborate in ways that would be difficult to do in the real world.

For instance, because this is a virtual world, the laws of physics and reality need not apply here. For instance, instead of walking/running to get around, people can fly. Which brings a whole interesting height aspect to the place. (More on this later.) Or, one can build a building that is bigger on the inside than the outside. So if you're a Doctor Who fan, you'll fit right in. But more importantly, users can design organizational systems inside of Second Life that are considerably different than the kind we're used to in the physical world.One such person is Dr. Gus Rosania of the Pharmacy & Bioinformatics Program at the University of Michigan. In Second Life, Dr. Rosania is known as Caia Alter. Dr. Rosania/Alter has set up a huge database of the results of tests that his program has produced. The pages of this database are presented as walls of floating pages that reach up as high as the eye can see. In Second Life, avatars have the ability to fly as well as walk around, so it is possible for users to fly around from one “physical” place to another, viewing whichever pages they deem pertinent.

It is this bending of the rules of physics that make this place so intriguing. Some companies have built giant models of molecular compounds to represent the subatomic work they are doing, in an effort to allow researchers a different way to experiment. Others have created virtual experiments dealing with atmospheric changes. The possibilities are seemingly endless.

With the switch from paper to digital records, we as information specialists are coming to realize that the management and organization of information cannot be thought about as arranging physical books in physical space. Instead, digital records can be cataloged to be in an infinite number of places simultaneously. Likewise, they can be connected to an infinite number of related works in an infinite number of ways. The question then becomes, what is the best way to catalog a work for a particular situation. A program like Second Life can help us to find new and enlightening ways to organize information, so that users from very different positions can find the information they need, in the most direct and useful ways they need it. This program might be a very rough version of the tools that we will use in the future, but it is an important tool in the meantime.