Admittedly I had no idea what Second Life was until last week and after watching this video I feel as though I'm about to star in my own cartoon. Better yet, I feel like I've chosen the red pill (or was it the blue) and stayed in the Matrix. Who shall I be? What shall I do? What should my avatar wear? Why am I worrying about any of this???? It's a fantasy space, a realm outside of my real life, so why do people still need jobs, houses, cars, in short why do they pay their hard-earned money in real life to buy things in their second life that only exist there? Are we so unhappy in our real lives that we'll pay or do anything to escape from them? What would Freud say if he saw these stats listed in The San Francisco Chronicle:
Estimates vary on how popular the virtual worlds will become. Technology research firm Gartner forecast this year that by 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users will have a "second life" in some sort of virtual world. Another research company, eMarketer, predicted last month that more than half of U.S. children and teens who use the Internet - about 20 million people - will visit virtual worlds by 2011.
About 8.2 million young Internet users, or 24 percent, already are checking out a virtual world once a month, eMarketer estimated.
In the past year, investors have put $1 billion in 35 virtual-world companies, according to a report advancing the Virtual Worlds Conference, being held Wednesday and Thursday in San Jose.
I guess the reality of fantasy is that people are still functioning in much the same way as they do in real life (though the results of these initial studies are still examining this). This means that we are customers in Second Life in the same way we are customers in our first life. The smart businesses and innovative entrepreneurs have already started to realize this and use it to their advantage (check out the Relay for Life island and see how much they were able to raise in Second Life). The reality of having a Second Life is that businesses and entrepreneurs have a second chance at generating awareness or gaining new customers. The only difference here is that they are restricted more by the limits of their imagination and innovativeness rather than location, demographic market, marketing funding, etc. So perhaps the questions Freud would raise are intriguing but not the question you should be asking yourself. Perhaps the better question is: What's your "Second Life" business plan?
4 comments:
You know this discussion is fun. I wanted to entitle my blog as, "I FOUND MYSELF IN SECOND LIFE."
What if you found someone playing your life out in second life? Or worse yet, you join second life and after awhile are living exactly the way you are now in your real life? That is, no beach house homes, hot illicit affairs, rock-n-roll life style period.....
Just your regular life in you small apartment with your same dog and same routines eating the same food with the same boring job all the while emoting the same repressed and stunted feelings and attitudes!!!!
and the same brown shoes with scuffed toes and the same beuracratic boss with the overstarched shirt and polyester FBI suit from the 70's and the same insomnia and the same lame-ass metro ride that you take every morning which is enough to make you want to just give up and go fly a big red kite somewhere.....
but, what if, dug, if one were to live life like they couldn't in real life? What if a paraplegic were to skydive, bungie-jump, etc in a "second life"? I'm sure you've thought of this already and were just being facetious. I myself would take the opportunity in a "second life" to live differently, no consequences.
Very interesting stats! 20 million people by 2011 and 8.2 million young kids? Thinking about this is very scary to me. I wasted almost 20hrs roaming around aimlessly on second life and chatting with other and listing some bad talk…It was addicting! In my opinion, at least for kids it is simply waste of time. I can’t even think of my kids visiting this site. Off course long way to go for my son because he is 5 now. So do you think that is there any advantage or useful for youth especially for kids?
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