By the early 2010s, it was being used to exchange for Bitcoin and other burgeoning cryptocurrencies, a scheme some charged could facilitate money laundering. You could exchange linden for dollars, leading to fluctuations in value, as well as other virtual currencies. As early as 2006, Second Life saw an influx of real-world companies pushing promotions and advertising into the virtual space. As Au’s book chronicles, the period from 2004–07 saw an increase in speculators enclosing virtual space and selling virtual goods in hopes of realizing a profit on what had originally been marketed as a commons. What had been a space premised on self-actualization and escape rapidly became a place with ownership rights and an in-world currency, called the linden. Within a year of its founding, the number of users expanded to about 15,000 and the real-world relations of property, money, and speculation began to encroach on Linden Lab’s dreamworld. As Web 2.0 was contemporaneously being born in fits and starts, Second Life promised its users arguably the most ambitious form of social networking and user generated content. People were able to live in Second Life and alter it by doing so, opening up possibilities for new kinds of sociality and getting closer to a presumably less dystopian version of the virtual experience described in Snow Crash’s Metaverse. Persistent spaces with highly customizable and manipulable avatars in effect meant time and space meant something in this virtual world. In his book The Making of Second Life, journalist Wagner James Au describes the ability to collectively be in a place and create in real time as the thing that set Second Life apart from its analogues. This meant every user was in effect experiencing the same thing at the same time, should they be in the same part of Second Life. This all took place in an integrated space that was stitched together across servers rather than copied in multiple instances.
0 kommentar(er)
