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at the beach or the world around me that s a really special thing but humble might not have visions of using this special quality to achieve world peace just yet one of the first things that occurred to me was i just want to bring a bunch of friends in here and watch a soccer match together he said i m a soccer fan and i want to hang around with other soccer fans and be here as fans because that s what you do events identity and expression second life second life metanomics with tom boellstorff 02 03 11 5 comments anthropologist tom boellstorff was our guest on metanomics this past monday it was an exhilarating conversation covering everything from the cultural implications of voice in second life to the concept of overlays as a way to think about our digital lives tom is an incredibly engaging person with an enthusiasm that left me and many in the audience i think feeling exhilarated about the future of virtuality we re just at the beginning in our understanding of what virtual worlds mean the implications of avatar embodiment and the larger cultural implications of our increasingly digital lives i ll comment more soon once the transcripts from the show are available in the meantime here s the video of monday s show events identity and expression second life metanomics monday masterclass on culture anthropology and the meaning of life 01 30 11 2 comments ok so not much ground to cover on tomorrow s metanomics when i host tom boellstorff noted anthropologist and author of the seminal work coming of age in second life the discussion lifts off of my previous post on the future of second life to which tom graciously responded in the comments in follow up chats with tom we toyed with a show focused on the merger of the teen and main grids we thought we might discuss how our journey as avatars in a virtual world isn t unlike our journey as humans from noob to teen to wiser and more mature um ok the latter is subjective and has nothing to do with parcel ratings i can t help thinking how true this is when you first arrive in second life you re like a little kid this is followed by your teen years of trying to fit in lots of shopping and endless hours dancing and chatting ok so my own teen years were nothing like that but you get the idea with tom however there s so much ground you can cover that it s tough to restrict yourself to one topic so we re going to just stick to the topic of everything and see where it takes us i ve interviewed tom previously for this blog and if you want some homework before the show it s worth a read or have a glance at a wonderful post that jennette forager put together in preparation for the show but prepared or not please join us on monday as i welcome tom boellstorff to metanomics 12 00 pm pacific time second life second life next 2011 01 09 11 59 comments so it s the first day on the job as the new ceo of linden lab you ve done your homework of course and you spent time with philip and maybe even mitch or other board members you ve read a few of the blogs tracked back through google to do a sort of second life history lesson and you ve been mulling over what you learned at your last job you have a pretty good idea that the staff will be restless and it s true most of them have been keeping their heads down the past few months not a lot has actually been done other than a few token pokes at projects and there s none of the fervor that marked life at the lab in the past and maybe that s a good thing they smile happily when they meet you but you can read the watchful waiting in their body language something that says ok so what the hell are we going to do the second life user community seems cranky about a few things but relatively calm without the benefit of having lived through several years of sl history you might not really grasp how incredible the drop off is in people writing or being passionate about second life blogs that have gone silent may have had the benefit of reducing the level of drama but this has also reduced the broader level of advocacy and usually for very good reason but maybe that s a good thing too it s not like the world is falling apart exactly things are stable or sputtering but not thriving quiet but not exciting and things don t break as much as it seems they once did first day clean sheet we all know your mandate build second life into something that someone somewhere would want to buy no pressure no hard and fast deadline and we won t say it in public but let s face it there s no ipo in the future and while a profitable linden lab can put money in someone s pocket the end game here is sale and not some sort of endless annuity so welcome to linden lab all eyes are on you your imagination unlocks a world of play i picked up a copy of create the game that rod humble the new ceo of linden lab headed up while at ea amongst other jobs and it s not such a bad game but even better is the box which has headlines that read spark your imagination the game that rewards you for being creative create your own scenes use your imagination to unlock rewards experiment to solve fun challenges open up more ways to play all of which is to say that create is a sort of cartoonish version of the second life value proposition although it s probably a lot closer to a more complex version of little big planet in terms of what it actually does aimed at a much younger demographic create takes the approach that you can facilitate user creativity by mapping out activities learning and making against rewards and unlocking points and so on but the game mechanics shouldn t distract from the fact that it s primarily a toy rather than a game with rewards and stages phases that are more extrinsic than they tend to be in second life unless you sell stuff or rent land his work on create and more specifically an interview he did with the guardian give me some faith that he understands the main value proposition of second life that when you help people to create things you are at the center of a deep kind of value what some people call fun but which can also unlock rewards of other kinds and so at a basic level the idea of second life will be familiar to the lab s new ceo he ll get it perhaps more handily than someone who comes from an ad agency as kingdon did and with virtual goods and user generated content remaining buzz words in both silicon valley and on wall street albeit with second life no longer considered even a remote contender for either he ll be working on ideas that are in favor with the facebook gaming crowd albeit for a company that pretty much no one cares about anymore but for me at least second life takes us beyond user generated content and virtual goods and it would be a mistake to now try to follow the buzz words that sl originally created and that have been picked up by others second life has taken us beyond even what it means to create a world to understand where second life can go from here it s important to understand that it is the place where for many people the future has been tested and we have come to an accommodation with a wider world of change user generated content is not a business model i ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few months well even more so than usual i guess about how user created content is reaching us in more places and how older forms of content are finding new life and meaning whether videos or tv shows or books or even old cartoons or magazines re purposed as ipad apps say because they are being accessed on new devices and in new formats and are thus more amendable than ever to being remixed or to use the current buzzword curated this has been driven in particular because of the breathtaking growth of mobile computing and has led to an acceleration in the reach and impact of this new digital mobile internet everywhere world rolling through or over depending how you look at it one media one area of life and one industry after another my own included a few years ago the idea of multi screen access to entertainment seemed like it would remain the province of digital natives tweeting or facebooking as they watched television or holding chats in ym or msn with their friends but at christmas i watched my father surfing an nfl ipad application as he watched a game on tv and i saw my mother texting information from google maps that she was looking up on her new macbook pro maybe not the widest survey of consumers in the world but a pretty good indication of how ubiquitous user curated media consumption has become now in the business world or on wall street the idea of user generated content is often interpreted as well as we get stuff for free from our users and while there are times when linden lab has tipped from facilitating user content to mining it what makes second life fairly unique is that the platform owner is not the only party who can make money off of the users content because of its unique combination of technology economy policy and community tyler cowen who appeared on metanomics points out that user generated content isn t just the stuff we make it s the way that we parse surf edit read participate comment edit and append as we live more and more of our lives online through his book create your own economy he points out that value in the digital age has shifted we are living in the new economy of well of me meaning that value is no longer simply dispensed and consumed but is dispensed and then achieves its value once we create our own meaning and context from it through the process of curation remixing editing participation and co creation on metanomics he commented on how virtual worlds demonstrate this wider trend i think what the web is and what virtual worlds are it s a blooming buzzing confusion that can be intimidating or it can be bewildering but the way you make it work for you is to go out there and literally impose order on it and use good filters have ways of drawing from it what works for you whether it s your twitter feed or rss or what island you go to in second life a world that appears completely unordered in fact in each of our individual minds a high degree of coherence and meaning we do the ordering it s like we create these private worlds of our culture using the powers of our own mind i think we re usually buying little dreams we not only buy food and shelter but when we choose styles or when we buy clothes with any kind of fashion when we decide how we re going to have our hair cut we re all in a way buying virtual goods because their importance exists only insofar as they are interpreted by other human beings what s important about them it s not like their physical attributes but again how they are interpreted by other people within this common framework of meaning so what virtual worlds do is they take that common framework of meaning and somehow make that more explicit technologically like there s an actual virtual space but i think it s copying something we ve been doing all along i think that s a big part of why it s powerful actually very natural it s very biological i think people think of virtual worlds as like contrary to biology or contrary to what they call atomic space to cowen an economist the economy of today is self created we assemble value on our own through our process of both creation but also through our acts of parsing the imaginative acts of others but the phrase i love best i think we re usually buying little dreams in this context he s referring to tangible goods and making the important point that even physical goods aren t always about their tangible aspects excepting commodities although even that can be argued but their cultural connotations and meaning the economy of things has become even before this digital age an economy of shared context and meaning because goods had continued to shift beyond the commodities necessary for survival an economy which to date had been largely facilitated by broadcast and mass media and distribution but in the digital age we can still share and communicate this framework of meaning but with a difference because the site in which that meaning is communicated allows for deeper personalization and choice and the creation of the artifacts from which meaning is constructed are accessible to everyone are more democratic and aren t reliant on a few delivery points or distribution channels the hammer force reality of this if you take it to its deepest extremes is that this capacity which has been facilitated by digital technology is upending nearly everything because whether we re going to the doctor s office or going to work whether we re headed on vacation or to a concert whether we re watching tv or reading a book on our kindle we have become accustomed or feel entitled depending on what you re talking about or your point of view to a world that offers us the ability to curate to remix to choose and to assemble experiences that fulfill our own personal definition of dreams rather than simply to adopt the assembled dreams of others in the developed world this process of assembly and curation is most often associated with the media we consume but over the past year i ve seen how powerful this notion is not just in its impact on how we entertain ourselves or connect with others but in how entire industries and enterprises are structured the meaning and construction of the jobs we do and the expectations we place on the wider culture and institutions which increasingly seem like relics in a more fluid and dynamic landscape in the industries that i work in which once seemed as immutable as possible in the face of change i m seeing one foundation stone after another crumble in the face of our individual ability to assemble dreams and i can t help thinking that the implications for the developing world are staggering second life is not a virtual goods platform and it s doesn t have a business model based on user generated goods it is instead a fully contained prototype of a version of the future in which technology has continued to take us in the direction of limitless choice in how the world we live in is constructed how we decide to interact with each other and the content that we choose to consume the business model of linden lab is to develop and support the tools that allow users to participate in an online environment in which they have a maximum amount of choice in how their digital lives are constructed and curated and to be a transactional partner in the buying of little dreams art and exploration augmented reality deep thoughts second life virtual world platforms the predictive power of virtual worlds 01 01 11 8 comments virtual worlds didn t so much predict the future as provide a giant sandbox in which to explore the different ways that the future could unfold in presentations i often say that i could have learned about social media from facebook or user generated content from youtube but i ended up in second life instead and by ending up th...