Another You-niverse

I decided for this week’s blog, after having actually experienced Second Life, to really dig into the publicity followed by the statistics for this phenomenon.

First, I decided to look into how other forms of entertainment illustrated such virtual worlds as Second Life. I happened to stumble across a summary of an episode of Law & Order SVU entitled “Avatar;” how suiting. The episode included a young girl who would have sex with men via the internet in exchange for the murder of her mother. The online sex-world the characters engage in turns into a real life rape and murder. As I continued my search, I then came across an actual website called www.virtualworldnews.com. Here, among many articles, I found a seemingly beneficial article entitled “Sci Fi Channel Partners with Trion for Interwoven TV Show and Virtual World.” (http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/06/sci-fi-channel.html) The article discusses a possible future TV show where individuals in virtual worlds actually compete and interact to predict what will happen on next week’s episode. Interestingly enough, the article happened to mention an episode of CSI, similar to Law & Order, which discusses a crime being committed like the one mentioned earlier. After seeing all this recurrent talk about Virtual Worlds, especially second life, in correspondence with major TV shows/stations one would assume that the popularity of Second Life and the like were constantly on the rise. My following research found a much different answer, though.

According to a recent study conducted by Yankee Groups, the use of Second Life is staggering as user growth reached its peak in October of 2006. Similar studies show statistics such as “users visit Second Life for only 12 minutes on average--per month” (http://www.edge-online.com/news/study-second-life-overhyped) and “The number of active users — defined as those who spent at least one hour in Second Life during the month — fell 3.8 percent to 540,151” (http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/09/25/second-life-user-hours-drop-in-august/). It is surprising to see these statistics as we have recently been viewing Second Life as an extremely over populated social network. Researchers propose that this decline in users could be accounted for by the increased use of mobile devices rather than people sitting around at PCs.
Regardless of these findings, though, we must still keep in mind that there are approximately 157,289 active users of Second Life in the United States alone which is a good number of individuals devoting extended amounts of time to the virtual world. As we all experiences in class, it takes some time to get used to Second Life. I know I personally spent at least 15 minutes trying to fix my appearance, and let’s just say I didn’t differ from the default character I chose more than just my eye color. This just goes to show the amount of time these active users commit to this website in order to be successful. Its also important to keep in mind that although use of the Second Life may be declining, that can only mean that other uses of technology are being created and may result in even more severe anti-social behaviors. Lets just hope we all don't end up living in another you-universe!