I saw A Scanner Darkly. It kicked ass. See it. Oh, and I'm coming home this weekend. Huzzah. I officially still hate calc.
Housing sent me a letter that implies that I behave negatively, unsafely, and unproductively because I relocated a couch. Oops! Click the thumbnail to read it.
I wrote this bit for my Lit class. It's about a NY Times article that I can't track down online. The article was about corporate advertising in SecondLife, an online life simulation.
I recall, vaguely, an old program called AmeriWorld. It wasn’t much more than a glorified chat program, and at the time, it was an amusing thing to play with. AmeriWorld was a virtual landscape where you commanded a character that would walk around, but you couldn’t do much more besides talk to people and visit virtual restaurants, and so on. A few years later, The Sims was released, and it was a huge hit. Players created an e-life, buying a house and even getting jobs, getting married, and possibly dying.
You put these two concepts together and you get SecondLife, a very involved online world. When I first read the article, titled “A Virtual World but Real Money,” I was so disguisted, I locked myself in my room for three days and rocked back and forth, hugging my knees and weeping for humanity. Actually, no. But I really, really wanted to, and I may have thrown up in my mouth a little.
SecondLife has a population of a million. It is a virtual world with a fully developed landscape which expands daily to accommodate new residents. Not only can you chat with “real” people over the internet, but you can take them out to dates, go to restaurants, eat, go to strip clubs, get a job. All of these things involve e-money, but e-money and American cash can be exchanged at the rate of 400 “Linden” for a dollar.
The Times article was about advertising in this world. Companies like Nissan and Sony buy land, or even private islands, and set up shops where users can test-drive cars or listen to new music. Apparently there’s a huge market for selling luxury items to people that never leave their homes.
What frightens me is the concept of SecondLife itself. Here you have a world where people can form an entire life, including a social life and a job. $500,000 in cash circulates in SecondLife daily. The article mentioned one woman who is a Russian translator by day, but a sexy real estate mogul at night. She sits at her computer and rents land to people. eLand. She gets paid actual money for this, most of which is probably spent on her internet connection and consumer goods. Well, ingame consumer goods.
I usually think of myself as a fairly lenient person as far as “if it feels good, do it” goes. I consider myself to be an existentialist; I think that if you like doing something, and you can do it well, then you’ve found your place in life. Honestly, though. Internet? I’ll admit I’m a bit of a geek, and yeah, there was a time in my life when I was closer to my e-friends than my “real” friends. I was also thirteen. I had no responsibility to anything. My biggest concern in life was getting some girl to notice me (failed) and remembering to show all my work on my math homework.
Life is hard. E-Life is not. Fine. Whatever. There’s not as much social anxiety when you’re on the internet, you don’t physically have to do anything, and you never have to wait for the bus when you want to buy a CD. I understand that. But is life seriously so difficult that people would rather spend every waking hour online, making their numbers bigger, and paying for the privelige to do so?
I’m not just making an argument of principle here. Yes, it’s disguisting that people prefer computers to, I don’t know, life, but considering some of the crap that goes on down here, I don’t blame them. But there’s more to it than just that. Some of these people have jobs. Important jobs. Children. If you have a six-year-old depending on you to make money to provide shelter, food, clothing, as well as depending on you to raise her? That’s not just irresponsible, it’s downright wrong.
