I have decided this will be my last post on Second Life and instead of going on the programme I have decided to see if I can find some useful articles about it. So far I have found each time on Second Life to be quite pointless and it has not been of much use. I’m not too sure why the programme has so many users and have no idea why I never seem to see anybody. The overall programme was slow to load and crashed many times when I was using it. A lot of other people I have spoken to have had this problem too.
After hearing that they were discussing Second Life on Radio 1 I searched the website to see if they had useful articles on the topic.
I came across this one http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/newsenglish/witn/2007/09/070905_second_life.shtml
In this article they discuss the problems with the programme and how they are planning to improve to increase its popularity. I thought this was quite good as the creator had identified that the programme had a lot of flaws. They also spoke about how businesses use it for things like meetings, selling products and recruiting. This made me think that maybe some people do actually find the programme useful and carried on looking for more articles to see if more people had uses for Second Life.
I found this article quite interesting http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ouch/2007/05/virtual_disability_nightclub.html
It spoke about disabled people using it so that they could freely roam around the world without their disability. In one way I think this is quite nice for them as they can explore in a way that they can’t in the real world. However, at the end it said “I need never leave the house again” which made me think that disabled people could become addicted to this kind of freedom and become anti-social in the real world. There’s so much in the real world to help the disabled people to get around now that they don’t really need to explore the world in a virtual way but can physically visit places of interest themselves.
So that Second Life was not a complete waste of my time I have been thinking about what I have learnt and could use to help me with my box/showcase. The only good thing I thought that could come out of this programme was the ability to create your avatar and be a completely different person able to explore the world and speak to people with more confidence. However, I feel that people to should learn to be confident enough to go places they want to go and make friends in the real world rather than a virtual one. To reflect this I am planning to make my avatar a puppet on strings. This will fit in with my theatre theme but also show what I have learnt from Second Life. I am going to create my avatar not looking particularly like myself but have it surrounded by items important to be and photos of my friends and family. This will represent the fact that you can act like a different person but will only ever be yourself.
