As you may have noticed, I invested quite a lot of time in the past few weeks exploring the Second Life phenomena.
One thing that surprised me last week at Reboot was the fact that very few peopele were discussing this topic, one that I was totally drenched in until a few hours before.
And this was even more curious because the main topic of the conference was “human”. To tell you the through there was one talk about second life and virtual spaces (and that I managed to miss), but that was the exception, and there was close to none chit-chat in the garden and in the hallways, even though SL emerged at times during conversations as part of the common technosocial background that we all shared.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, I read that the hype around SL grows, and for instance more and more Italian cities (latest is Genova) are creating a presence on the Grid, while at the “Festival dell’Innovazione” (Innovation Festival) SL has been described as a playground where democracy can meet autoregolamentation (see this article for context… and ok, it was a politician who said that but still…).
Uhm… maybe it’s just that they’re two different, only partly overlapping, worlds:
I wandered a lot through the islands of SL and met and talked to a lot of people. And many of them are really interesting artists or enterpreneurs or idealists or programmers people who has a lot to do and to tell the world… but only few of them are bloggers, too: the vast majority (at least of those I interacted with) chose Second Life as their media of choice.
And this maybe is perfectly normal, but I think quite sad if this leads to innovation effort being split in different closed circles.