Flamethrower of Truth II: Second Life as a “Bad Websiteâ€
If you’ve never worked with the media, there’s one thing to keep in mind: the only thing they like better than building something up is tearing that same thing down. It does wonders for their sense of power, and hey, two sensationalistic articles are always better than one.
Which is my preface as I turn the Flamethrower of Truth on Time Magazine, who joins Forbes in the "we really, really don’t get Second Life" category.
(It would be interesting to turn the clock back a decade or so and see how many articles they ran about "nobody making money on the internet.")
I really don’t have time to go through all the factual inaccuracies of the Times blurb–which start with the fact that Second Life is not a website, and "notoriously slow to load" is an oxymoron when applied to a world that’s accessed from a dedicated client, rather than an internet browser.
What I do have time to throw the Flamethrower of Truth on is Time’s allegation that spending time in Second Life is "pathetic" and that corporate presence is a case of "CEOs trying too hard to be hip."
Yeah. Pathetic like all those people who wasted time developing code for personal computers in 1982. Pathetic like all those people building the first websites and web applications in 1994. I mean, hey, they could have been kayaking and jogging and networking at trendy bars–you know, those hip activities that make you a Big Person that People Should Know. Instead, they created things like the Macintosh and Windows and Office and Yahoo and Google and eBay and . . .
You get the picture.
And "trying too hard to be hip" like IBM’s CEO and the 230 IBMers in world, who are taking this opportunity dead seriously. If you wonder why IBM might have a moratorium on picking up new real-world office space, look no farther than Second Life. Trying too hard to be hip, like the 200 real-world educational institutions in-world who are delivering distance learning in a much more engaging and interactive environment. Trying too hard to be hip, like the dozen companies I can’t talk about on this blog, for whom we’re developing useful, engaging, or entertaining places, events, and applications in Second Life?
Again, you get the picture.
It’s easy to be a critic, especially when you have spent no time in-world. I say to the media: why don’t you take off the ties, turn off the TV, and dive into Second Life for a week. Then come back and tell us what you really think. Not what you think will sell magazines.
