Your2ndPlace

When 'Second Life Improves Real-life Social Skills' came up on my radar, I just had to ask myself what it was about. Since I had not written the article, I had no idea - so I went and read it. It seems that a PhD student has submitted a paper that has been interpreted as saying that Second Life assists real social skills.

She definitely hasn't been hanging out with my crowd. Or Pighed, for that matter. It isn't that I don't believe that Second Life has the capacity for positive social skill development - I just seem to have the soft and putrid underbelly of it in my face all too often.

From the article:

..."There are not many places we go in the world where we are guaranteed social contact, in real life it is harder and less likely that you will go up to a stranger and start a conversation," said Ms Grant...

But in Second Life, unless you create some sort of real world link with the owner(s) of the other avatar(s), everyone is a stranger. Some are stranger than most, and most are stranger than people outside of Second Life - sometimes in nice and interesting ways, but sometimes in disturbing and macabre ways. A balance is struck based on who you wish to be associated with... but when you're writing about Second Life, that balance has to be less utopian and more realistic.

The point is that Second Life is where chatrooms were in the mid-1990s. You can chat up a storm with just about anyone; you can claim to be the King of England or a peasant in Albania who is stealing an Internet connection. You can be a man pretending to be a woman, a woman pretending to be a man, a man pretending to be a woman who is pretending to be a man, a critter or even a robot... or all of the above with a few dashes of rationalized insanity. That was the original lure of the Internet - anonymity. But it won't last - and when it doesn't, will any perceived use as a social skill building tool go away? No idea.

What I do know is that talking to strangers is easier than in the real world - but that is also because there is less risk of rejection, or at the least a more acceptable risk. Speaking for myself, the people I communicate most with are people I know through un-Second Life connections. A few I have gotten to know through Second Life, but not many.

At the end of the day, virtual or otherwise, I don't know that speaking to strangers in Second Life or anything else is an acceptable scientific metric. If speaking to strangers in Second Life is a building of social skills, I must wonder how many people who use Second Life are now more willing to talk to complete strangers in the real world.

'Hey, where did you get your prim hair?'

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