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1994: Rosedale's Bloom

Not only is Second Life about to catalyze an economic boom period, it may also result in better people, according to Philip Rosedale.

At State of Play and SLCC (10/07/05 - 10/09/05) distinguished legal scholars, employees of Linden Lab, and diverse others already exposed to the SL technology and corresponding memes, all reiterated the party-line phrase: "Second Life is a platform, not a game."  The existing data on the adoption rate of Second Life overwhelmingly supports this notion. 

Bloom

The SL adopter curve does not correspond to the the adoption patterns of video games.  Instead, it perfectly lines-up with the shape of an Interactive Communication Technology curve as defined in Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations.  The most recent data, presented by Jerry Paffendorf at SLCC, shows that SL diffusion is rapidly accelerating into the "knee" of a diffsuion curve.  What's more, the data shows that this curve is a bit sharper than the S-curve of the web browser, which Rogers' theory on subsequent generations of ICT's predicts. 

Whenever a technology diffusion curve enters the "knee" period, this signals that the diffusion of the technology has become self-sustaining, that network effects are adding and communicating sufficient value.  This certainly appears to be the case as the volume of user-created content and unique experience possibilities in SL have made the platform much more appealing to new users.  The activation of mass communication channels, which always occurs at the "knee" period of an ICT curve, is also just begining to happen as organs like the Blogosphere, MTV News, Newsweek, and the Acceleration Studies Foundation all find in compelling to commuicate information about this new technology.

So, what are the social implications of this budding new ICT?

At the Accelerating Change Conference (9/18/05) Philip Rosedale, creator and CEO of Second Life and self-admitted futurist, alluded to an impending economic boom when he argued to the audience "we're at 1994."  Then at the first inaugural Second Life Community Convention (10/09/05) he elaborated by comparing Second Life to the Mosaic web browser that sparked the dot-com boom of 1994 - 2001.  While this statement can be looked at as a powerful marketing meme, it's also true.

Because the SL platform has the potential to effectively incorporate all previous ICTs and corresponding organizational structures, it can be looked at an overarching efficiency generator.  By allowing streaming audio, streaming video, embedded web browsing, a functioning micro-payment market, and intuitive content creation in a virtual 3-D environment, Second Life is emerging as a the hyper-fluid economic substrate required for Friedman's flattening of the world.  It is no accident that Joi Ito, technologist and board member of the Mozilla Foundation, has dubbed Second Life as a key component of "Web 3.0" or "Web 3-D."  (How about .ddd ?)

In its short life SL has already provided business-minded users the opportunity to earn as much as $150,000 (or more) U.S. annually via the platform.  When the number of users increases to millions and potentially billions, as signalled by the ICT curve, these $ amounts will shoot up dramatically.  This all makes sense from the context of mass network effects combined with unprecedented combinations of technological structures.

As Second Life, and the other emerging central components of Web 3.0/The Metaverse, allow complex new socio-technological operations to emerge, many of these new behaviors will result in dramatic increases in broader economic efficiency.  The result in the near-term is a new economic boom, similar to the dot-com boom, that is begining RIGHT NOW. 

What remains to be seen is which economic sectors will benefit, how sovereign entities will cope with this shift, what role youth will play, etc.  In other words, what does this really mean to the human species?

According to Rosedale, "the world is getting better, Second Life is making people better."  This assertion also appears to be true for several general reasons: 1. The users of SL appear to exhibit greater than normal levels of social empathy.  2. Systematic Increase in Social IQ.  As technology makes us smarter over time (related to the Flynn Effect) we can expect to develop more top-mindedness and thereby value human resources more.  3. The Pen Pal Effect.  International collaboration ends conflict, as evidenced at the end of WWII when France and Germany overlapped businesses and saw a subsequent systemic decrease in hostility toward one another.  SL allows individuals of diverse backgrounds to more meaningfully interact and develop friendships with other diverse individuals.

As more data and theoretical evidence for such an empathy increase mounts over the coming months, I suspect it will become apparent that the Metaverse Boom just underway is autocatalytically fueling and being fueled by Rosedale's Social Bloom.

How's that for techno-optimism?

Posted by alvisbrigis on October 11, 2005 |

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Comments

Frank Hecker

Could we get some sources for the postulated increase in "Social IQ" and statements like "users of SL appear to exhibit greater than normal levels of social empathy"? I'm all for promoting the power of the Internet (and, by extension, virtual worlds) to help people communicate, but I've always been skeptical of claims that having everybody go on-line (whether via plain-text email or 3D worlds) will eliminate conflict, bring world peace, promote planetary consciousness, etc.

I have a fair degree of experience in participating in online communities, including helping to oversee and govern such communities, and I can testify that there is no magic "pixie dust" (to quote JWZ) that makes it easier to manage conflicts online as opposed to offline. It's just the same old boring grunt-level political work that has sustained human societies for thousands of years.

I venture to say that you could drop a big-city mayor, Renaissance prince, Roman provincial governor, Mesopotamian priest-king, or tribal chieftain into Second Life and once they got past the interface and the avatars they would easily be able to figure out the politics of the place and how they could "work" those politics, for personal gain or the common good as the case may be.

Make no mistake, I think Second Life is worth paying attention to, and I wish I had more time to spend there myself (humble basic account holder that I am). I just don't happen to think that it's going to create a "new man".

Posted by: Frank Hecker | October 11, 2005 at 03:15 PM

alvisbrigis

Frank: Could we get some sources for the postulated increase in "Social IQ" and statements like "users of SL appear to exhibit greater than normal levels of social empathy"?

I apologize for not including the sources earlier and deserve the rebuke!

Social IQ: The Flynn effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect) shows that human IQ is rising over time, perhaps exponentially. Flynn believes this is due to environmental pressures on social groups and has interesting research that links environment to increases in intelligence. (i.e. http://www.apa.org/journals/features/rev1082346.pdf)

SL User Empathy: (Definitely super-speculative and warranting criticism.) This is based on my 1st person experiences in SL and at SLCC. In-world I've found that people are in general very helpful in a non-zero-sum kind of way, especially compared to other VW's like Everquest and even The Sims, and certainly in comparison to real life. At SLCC I found the assembled SL users to be remarkably helpful and friendly. I heard others echo this sentiment. This may be due to selection bias, but I'm going with my gut on this one, and thereby inviting the appropriate criticism.

Posted by: alvisbrigis | October 11, 2005 at 04:56 PM

Prokofy Neva

I believe there is an exponential explosion of some kind in SL because I see it anecdotally in my business and activities in SL, not only because I see it on Jerry's chart. But I see a lot of fluff and breathlessness around this, too. It's not going to bring world peace, as Frank Hecker said, and we're not all sitting and singing "Kumbayah" when there are bouncer scripts, land bans, mute lists, and private islands where you can shut everybody out.

If anything, SL affords the possiblity for a brewing of an incredibly virulent virus of totalitarian memes that can create a really resistant closed society pretty darn fast. All the open-society memes that undo that can be thrown off base by the technorati's skills over the basics' minimal-level usage knowledge. Sure, there's bunches and bunches of people coming in. Some of them gel right away. Others just take loads of knowledge transfer and there just aren't enough people and "memory palaces" to pass it all on. I had so many people asking for help that I built a lot with simple objects on it like birds or chairs with the hover text "how do I fly" or "how do I sit down" to send people to but also with all those harder-to-answer questions like "where are all the people and how do I make friends" and "how do I make money?" (Obviously after reading all these breathless articles in the mass media, they want the money-making machine first.)

Anybody who spends a lot of money on this game like I do knows that in a way, SL is like a boat. A boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money. SL is a hole in the Internet into which you pour money. You get back a whole lot more...but...it's a huge risk and feels so fragile.

I think as these curves accelerate what SL needs are not just the early-adapter tekki-wiki folks and the casual blingers and householders but lots of thoughtful journalists, academics, cultural anthropologists, political scientists, democracy aid project specialists, government officials, etc. that really think hard about how societies get made and get kept free -- *and who bother to come in and really live and work in this world and not just casually parachute in for a little cool streaming conference*. The danger here is that the society getting built could be a Snowcrash-like junk yard of grey public-access avatars and bossy franchulates over which is superimposed a cool elite with a mega-sense of entitlement.

SL isn't a game, but it is play. It's easy to forget what work is really involved in making countries work.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | October 11, 2005 at 07:27 PM

Frank Hecker

On "Social IQ" and the Flynn effect: As I understand it from reading the Wikipedia article, the Flynn effect refers to increases in general intelligence as measured by IQ tests, which may or may not be positively correlated with "social IQ" in the sense of increased ability to function in a social environment; certainly the case of Asperger's syndrome shows that negative correlation is possible.

On SL empathy: I don't think the fact that SL users are frequently helpful to one another necessarily implies that SL will be less free of conflict than RL. A lot of helpfulness, especially when directed at newbies, is in the context of a superior/subordinate relationship that is accepted as such by both participants (similar to other relationships such as teacher/student or manager/employee). In my experience most group conflicts arise either between equals or in superior/subordinate relationships where the subordinates come to perceive themselves as equals.

Regarding Prokofy Neva's point about SL needing people who "really think hard about how societies get made and get kept free": Not to flatter him overmuch, but the appearance of gadflies and dissidents within SL is not an unwelcome aberration but a sign of SL's beginning to mature as a community. IMO gadflies/dissidents play a valuable role in societies, analogous to people in open source projects who are great at finding bugs, especially ones that crash the software. I think the analogy is even closer if you consider the special case of people who find security holes in software, who often have a quite adversarial relationship with the people responsible for fixing those holes.

I myself am one of those people who "parachute in" to these discussions; I do this sort of thing in my day job, so doing it in SL would be rather a busman's holiday. (When I go into SL I deliberately head for the squares with no green dots.) I think SL can and will develop its own effective community activists and organizers, politicians and governors, etc., just as (for example) happened in various open source development communities. However I do agree with Prokofy Neva that massive growth in users is going to severely strain the SL body politic.

Posted by: Frank Hecker | October 11, 2005 at 09:49 PM

Craig

The adoption curve is starting to shoot up. We're entering the early adopter phase.

But that doesn't imply SL is the best platform for these people. SecondLife has many flaws and is still a first-generation product. It's definitely showing its age, both graphically and in terms of player content allowances.

I expect a different piece of software to be the big adoption. One that is honed and polished by looking at the triumphs and troubles of SecondLife.

There's no reason it can't be a Linden Labs piece of software, but most of the people I know will never enjoy playing this version of SL. It's simply too rough around the edges.

Posted by: Craig | October 12, 2005 at 09:19 AM

Torley Torgeson/Torley Wong

I just like the saying, "Rosedale's Bloom". It's very beautiful.

Posted by: Torley Torgeson/Torley Wong | October 13, 2005 at 11:09 AM

Jimbob Peltaire

I have been following the growth of Second Life for a bit more than a year now. It seems that the early adopters are most willing to come forward with the notion that SL is not a game. A statement technically true. However, as most are not "technical" it may take such a label to convince the rest of society to play along.

Maxis certainly made a point of making life a game. Showing the value of choice against time and resource. Mr. Wright just happened to be wrong when he omitted real stakes and choices. Second Life's adoption rate has everything to do with stakes and they are just going rise with the population.

If the current rate of adoption sticks closely to the lines of Paffendorf's chart, an in world result will look like a flawless imitation of real world economics and behavior. The trend toward outright capitalism is inevitably built into the system. So is capitalism game-like?

I caught a line from Rosedale on Sunday. He said, "People are companies too." He laughed and said it with low volume. Perhaps he knows how game-like Second Life really is. Perhaps he knows how game-like real life is.

It took an evolution of tool making to spark the industrial revolution which then resulted in a league of competitive companies. It certainly took a game-like structure to further the process with the introduction of the stock exchange, which, sort of resembles a scoreboard. With the same token, but a faster train, Second Life will grant individuals the tools needed to run themselves publicly much like a company, or say a player in Fantasy Baseball.

It will certainly be interesting to see how game-like Second Life will seem given a bundle of growing years. It will be as interesting to see how game-like people will treat real life with the same period of time spent in Second Life.

Lindex = Human Resource Stock Exchange.

Posted by: Jimbob Peltaire | October 13, 2005 at 09:53 PM

Jerry P

CNET's just picked up a quote from this post in their "Real-life, virtual worlds collide" article.

Posted by: Jerry P | October 13, 2005 at 11:37 PM

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