Friday, January 14, 2011

Big Visions, Little Visions, Second Life's Failure

Gone to his Head
Location: Hollering, at the Rebel Yell

I've written, at the VWER site, a long analysis of Second Life's failure to become the sort of disruptive technology that Philip Rosedale envisioned.  I'm thinking of Tim Wu's term for technologies that create entire new industries building a system to replace older forms of communication.

Other than a smug image of my avatar and a Philip-Rosedale parody-bot at the Burn 2.0 arts event, I think--think--I kept my snark in check.

I hope my claims about SL are not mere sour grapes over the end of Richmond Island in SL and the departure of so many educators from that technology.  It's premature to say we victors write the histories, because educators are still using SL and will, while OpenSim is very much a pioneer's environment. Moreover, Linden Lab might still recapture a niche market they are losing now and make their metaverse the standard-bearer.

That I doubt. Read the article and I'll explain why.

2 comments:

Novella Greymyst said...

You know Iggy, I see your comments almost on a daily basis, subscribe to your blog and I hate to say it, but you are snarky and sound sour grapes/bitter. I am not a big LL fan, but I wince whenever I see your comments – I know I’m going to hear a lot of vitriol and not learn much new. I don't know if you mean to come off this way, but boy it sounds like you a chip on your shoulder. I have attempted over the last few months to listen to your comments in order to learn from your experience, but all I've learned is that you don't like LL – a lot.

Your SL and the SL I experience are two different things...sorry, just being an honest reader

Iggy O said...

It's a fair barb you stick in me, Novella. There is a chip there, to be sure. I was just irked mildly at LL in 2010, and I had been planning to bring a class back to SL this semester.

Then Philip attended the SLCC education session and tried to make good with educators, even as LL prepared to double tiers for nonprofits and education.

Perhaps he was but one member of LL's board--though an important one--and voted against the decision. We'll never know, and perhaps at SLCC he was doing whatever preventative damage control ahead of the tier announcement that he could.

I'm not the only educator feeling betrayed by the failure of SL to become something useful to us.

If SL suits your needs and you are having fun, I sincerely wish you luck there. As you can tell, however, mostly this blog is moving on to other worlds where I'm spending more and more time.

I will, honestly, try to be more temperate in future posts, especially since they'll have more to do with other grids.