It's interesting to note that there have been two BlogHer entries on the virtual reality platform Second Life just in the last week (here and here). Second Life has more than 264,000 residents now, and while the numbers don't approach anywhere near the traffic of social networking sites such as MySpace, it is well on its way into mainstream culture.

Second Life is also becoming an important tool in industry and academia. Earlier this month, I attended the New Media Consortium annual summer conference. NMC's membership includes universities, IT companies, and non-profit groups such as museums. NMC is one of several academic organizations that now has a campus that allows members to hold meetings, collaborate and do research.

As this article from Wired explains, many professors are attracted to the possibilities that a virtual universe presents for teaching and research. BlogHer Angela Thomas has been using Second Life to study issues of identity in virtual game space in her blog, i-Anya. Since I've been thinking about using SL for my media ethics class, i-Anya has been an invaluable guide to helping me understand what I should be thinking about. (You can see what news reporting looks like in SL by checking out the Second Life Herald.

Among the important issues that i-Anya has got me thinking about how SL gamers see themselves in relation to the avatars they create. For example, she's got a podcast from Open Source Radio on her site that features an interview with virtual identity guru Sherry Turkle of MIT. There's also interesting reflections on her own process of Self-fashioning in SL. And I was intrigued by her reaction to this Harvard Business Review article on marketing to avatars:

"The Harvard Review article is slightly jarring in the way they seem to divorce the avatar from the person it embodies, but the point it ended on was interesting: will people go to a business in SL and buy one item for their avatar, and a duplicate item for their real self? Let me think about the items in my inventory and see whether I would buy any of them for real…

You can find out what she concluded, but the whole subject raises lots of interesting questions. Even if you aren't a role-playing gamer, do you think of yourself as having an online persona? How does that persona relate to who you are in real life? And does your online persona affect the way you spend your money or live your real life?

nmc2006