Telling: Like it Is

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Should I bother with adding my opinion about Linden Lab's beta Viewer 2.0 to the hundreds already posted? Oh, what the hell... why not? Nobody at the Lab is going to read it, and if they did it wouldn't matter. The course is set, the 12-sided die is cast, and eventually even the 3rd-party adaptations of the code will march to the same drummer, even if in a different battalion. So pardon me while I blow off some steam.

I downloaded it the day of its release, viewed Torley's tutorials, and "used" it for approximately 8 hours. "Used" is in quotes for a few reasons, which I'll try to make clear... but I'm going to have to do that with words only. No illustrative screenshots for this post, I'm afraid; I refuse to start 2.0 beta up again. If you've tried it, you'll know what I'm describing. If you haven't tried it yet, don't. Wait until you have no choice but to use the post-beta "final" release.

Let's hit the good stuff first. There are two -- count 'em, two -- changes in the new viewer design which I judge to actually be improvements. The first is the re-organization of the top menu bar, especially the division of the catch-all "Advanced" menu into two, which can be individually displayed or hidden at the user's discretion. Mind you, there are things still in the Advanced menu which n00bs (who are the target demographic) ought to know about, be able to find, and enable or disable -- "quiet snapshots", "multiple threads", and turning off "show Away when idle", for instance -- without needing to see the rest. Overall, the menu designers did a good job.

The second genuine improvement can be called "The Death of the Blue Boxes". Those annoying drop-downs in the upper right corner (group notices, teleport offers, inventory offers, payment confirmations), as well as requests for IM, have been replaced with a series of notification "chiclets" at the bottom right of the screen -- exactly the sort of thing I'm looking at right now in the status bar of Firefox, with its notification plug-ins for Gmail, Yahoo mail, and Twitter. With those, I can choose whether to react to them right away, or later, or not at all. That kind of discretion is now granted by the new viewer, whereas before, you pretty much had to deal with them, just to get them off your screen.

Maybe you'd think, with that evidence, that "screen real estate" would be a guiding principle of the design... wouldn't you? It wasn't, and it won't be. Every other major change -- and a few of the minor ones -- has the effect of eating screen in great big bites. Most prominent and therefore worst offender: the sidebar.

The Sidebar Must Die!

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What I'm about to say has been said before, by others -- but I'm going to say it anyway:

Forget "Second" and "first": Life is Life. The nature of the media through which a life is lived is irrelevant to the quality and significance of that life. Are words only authentic when spoken, and not when they're typed on a screen? Can you only touch someone's emotions if you can touch their skin with yours? People care about you, more than you may be willing to contemplate. If something happens to you in the organic part of your life that prevents you from returning to the virtual, people who care about you will be left to wonder and worry.

Make a connection between your virtual life and your organic life. Do this in the name of -- and with proper respect for -- your relationships with people you only interact with online.

I am inspired to this, on a Sunday morning, by a concatenation of two other people's words. One is Charlanna Beresford, who recently blogged in "Two Times One Minus One" about integrating SL and RL, with the vital subtext of authenticity. She was not -- as she eventually felt the need to reiterate in the comments -- talking about divulging details of identity like name, address, and phone number. She was talking about abandoning the false dichotomy, the pretense that your avatar is a tabula rasa, the belief that somehow you can turn off, ignore, omit the "youness" of you when in-world. Her opening conjecture makes that clear: "[T]he more people have to work to keep their first and second lives separate, the shorter their second life."

My second inspiration comes from Skate Foss, whose friend (and estate manager) abruptly stopped logging in to SL more than two weeks ago. Here's Skate's tweet from this morning:

Now 17 days, my friend Rosario Carbetta -missing from #SL -She owns a huge store & has many close friends, can't believe she can just vanish

Previous tweets have included the only other information Skate seems to have about Rosario: she lives in (or near) The Hague, Netherlands.

I want to make this clear: I'm not talking about who gets your stuff, like in this November 2009 article from the New York Times. Your possessions, whether physical or pixel, are -- pardon the pun -- immaterial. The primary considerations should be: the effect your presence has on others, and the impact your sudden absence will have on them.

So, make a connection. Trust someone. Create a channel so that everyone who cares about you can know what's happened if -- inevitably, when -- you suddenly disappear from among them. Stop pretending that the ones you see on the screen are "just pixels"... Stop pretending that the you you see on the screen is just pixels.

And now I need to follow my own advice.

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Sometimes, situations and trends change so rapidly that it's nearly impossible to get your brain wrapped around them, let alone keep it there... so you "go with your gut". My personal gut has been in a slow churn of nausea about social networks, their integration into other "platforms", the resulting effect on personal privacy, and the insidious motive of monetization driving it all.

Precisely when "opting out", instead of "opting in", became the normal requirement for all those extra services marketers would love to convince you that you need, is lost in the aether of the Web. It began when those fine-print check-boxes at the bottom of online registration forms appeared with the checks already applied -- "I wish to receive a newsletter...", "I wish to receive offers from associated merchant partners..." -- with the statistically realistic expectation that enough people would miss seeing them, in the same way that most people (myself included!) skip reading Terms of Service and End-User License Agreements and just say, "OK, yadda yadda, just install the damned software already."

But... Recent abuses creative applications of the "opt-out" technique, most notoriously perpetrated by Facebook, have renewed my sensitivity to the issue, and my diligence about it. And, in the past week or so, a couple of new developments in the arena of socnets vs privacy have raised my ire to the point of action. Ironically, in my own case there's a tenuous connection.

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I am now the proud owner of two full, 15 kiloprim regions, both named LaloLand. The server that runs them is the computer on my desk at home; yes, they're OpenSims. One is a standalone that only exists on my desk; the other is connected to OSGrid, at coordinates 9998, 9993. And they don't cost me a dime -- no set-up fees, no "tier", only the electricity my computer uses to run them (and my monthly ISP bill, which I pay anyway).

Actually, I haven't run the standalone since entering OSGrid (really, there's no need), but it's still there and I could boot it up at any time. Inspired by my partner Kate, I downloaded it on Jan. 22 and messed with it for a few days. Then, on Jan. 26, she emailed me to say she'd created a sim in OSGrid -- I jumped in the following day, and was lucky to grab an adjacent empty square.

There are a lot more photographs, with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one telling what each one is*... that is, the region's evolution up to yesterday. You can find them in my Picasa album "LaloLand" [and do please look at the other albums in the series :) ] I didn't want to go into a lengthy discussion of the progress here, or turn this into a primer on starting up your own (but there's a list of essential links at the end of this post).

I want to talk about why.

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Yeah, OK... Two days after I posted that list of other folks' reactions to Wallace Linden's fumble and major loss of yardage on his first play of the game, Linden Lab changed the game again. To put the best light on it (which means I may be blowing smoke): Maybe they got the message that Facebook was not the social network to get in bed with after all. They found a pre-existing socnet called Avatars United (AU), which looks, on its facebook, as a solution to the "problem" that only existed in the collective mind of the Lab in the first place. But -- the Lab didn't just say, "Hey, all you folks who want to connect out-of-world as your SL avatars, here's something you might try." No, they bought the sucker!

What with? Who knows? They're a private corporation, and not obliged by law to publicly report earnings or profits. The likes of us will never know whether this acquisition came out of the petty cash drawer, or the pockets of the venture capital backers... or what it will do to the Lab's bottom line in subsequent quarters. From the looks of it, though, they can't have stretched the budget too much. They can't have stretched their foresight very much, either (Linden Lab? Foresight?), because what they bought included hardware that couldn't handle the rush of new applicants -- including me -- who pounced on the site as soon as the announcement hit the screens. Three days later, I'm still getting the occasional "503" error when their server constipates.

There's a second, but very important, reason for the influx of new signups. Early entries discovered that avatar names are not verified with the various MMO's and virtual worlds one can assign affinities to at AU. Consequently, there was a lot of "Oh, shit -- I'd better get my name in there before someone else pretending to be me does!" A couple of reactions to this stand out, the first being Grace McDunnough's post at her blog Phasing Grace: "Virtual Identity and Real Value". The second -- one might call it the nuclear option -- came from Ordinal Malaprop, who summarily pulled the plug on her SL existence. (You may also want to read Dio Kuhr and Emily Orr about Ordinal's self-immolation.)

I've been fairly vociferous in my objection to the "mass marketing" of SL as advocated by the likes of Hamlet Au, and have used phrases like "Facebook mentality" to excoriate the dumbing-down of Second Life. I confess: never having used a social network like FB, I was speaking from my gut. Three days after joining AU, I'm learning -- not only was my gut feeling accurate, but Facebook mentality is already alive and well among some SL Residents.

Case in point: While I was typing the above paragraph, yet another request to "unite" arrived from someone I've never heard of. I clicked on his profile, and discovered he's a land-owner promoting his business. In plain English: a spammer.

[Edited 2/2/10 to add:]

Tweeting with Skate Foss earlier today reminded me that I'd only included half of the problem with "Facebook mentality". The other half is:

People who rank quantity of "friends" over quality of friendships.

It's not a freaking game, folks! You don't get a prize for having the longest list.

So, here's the deal: Just like in SL, I will not automatically accept "random friendings". If you're a stranger, you need to suggest why you shouldn't remain one. That's what the gorram message field in the "Unite us" popup is for. Use it!

Or be ignored, your choice.


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