People ask me a shocking amount whether I study “stuff like SecondLife?” That is, when I say I’m studying language and or on the internet, they often assume it has to do with internet-internal environments or practices, like games, “virtual communities,” or immersive environments. While this is to some extent true (message boards are a really nice source of data, for instance, and social networking sites can count as “virtual community” [then again, what can't? -ed.]), for the most part, I don’t care about these environments, at least not in any especially academic way.
In fact, part of the reason I came to internet and CMC studies was because I was dissatisfied at how the internet was consistently characterized in the academic literature in studies on language: usually, people were interested in language as used in inherently anonymous, or novel, or online-focused settings, with an implication that these were the places where the most interesting “internet effects” were happening. Rather, my interest was in how people were using text-based modes of interpersonal communication, conveniently facilitated by the internet (e.g. IM, email), as integrated components of their daily linguistic practices: usually not anonymous, not so alternate-reality-feeling, and not with strangers.
Oh, where was I going with this? Oh yeah! SecondLife. So now that SecondLife has gotten all this media attention the past several months, people have started increasingly asking me about it. And I know almost nothing about it. People on the Association for Internet Researchers listserv are always talking about it, and occasionally I’ll run across a news article, and I pulled up the site once or twice and looked at a world map – but for the most part I know nothing, and I don’t feel compelled to know a particularly large amount more. Not because it’s not important or interesting for some people to study, just not me.
Anyway, now that I’ve explained that whole rant about why I can’t be expected to care about SecondLife, let me give the link I started out writing this in order to give. Thanks to Masters of Media for bringing my attention to Get a FirstLife. I’m going to start telling people to visit this site when they ask me about SecondLife. It will seem rude, and I will love it.
