The digital wilderness

by Tateru Nino Nov 29th 2008 at 10:00AM

Filed under: Culture, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds

It's considered to be a vast expanse of digital territory whose growth far outpaces the number of people actually using it. Huge tracts of it are completely abandoned wastelands, failed venues and disused stores. Parts of it are struggling venues trying to attract visitors. A few places are consistently busy, but they also bring the risk of abusive and disruptive people, who get their jollies from messing things up for others.

Advertising -- often quite intrusive -- is everywhere. At any moment you could be confronted by imagery of penises or of distasteful sexual practices. Committed users are freaks, and successful ones are geeks and enough people tend to choose anonymity that you're never really sure who you're talking to.

Sure there's businesses using it, commerce being done, and plenty of educational institutions who can no longer live without it, but that all seems just a small part of it compared to the time-wasting, boring, and sexual aspects doesn't it?

You all know the place we're talking about, right?

No, it isn't Second Life or any other virtual world. We're talking about the World Wide Web.

In most criticisms of virtual worlds, you can just replace "Virtual World" or "Second Life" with "World Wide Web" and the text is just as applicable. Actually, you can still see many of the same criticisms leveled at the Web as you do at virtual worlds.

But for the most part, we brush them off and carry on. These criticisms don't make us think that we should suddenly stop using it. Why?

Because we know the Web is a successful tool. You might like the Web and you might loathe it, but the odds are you have to use it virtually every day. Most industries these days use the Web in some business capacity for most of their jobs on a daily basis. Whether you want to use the Web or not, it probably isn't your choice.

You're tracking parcels, looking up company credit ratings, booking flights, finding contact information, checking out products and services, filling in status and progress reports for your boss, making complaints, getting customer service and more. The Web has become an integral part of 21st century business, and of the lives of many of us.

And it only took about 13 years for that to happen.

The current generation of virtual environments is quite a bit younger than that, and the jury is still out on their utility. Those same tired old criticisms of them are going to keep going long after they kick into the same sort of mainstream usage that the Web has.

You'll know it's happened when the buzz and the unwarranted hype (both positive and negative) starts to die down, and we start ignoring those criticisms, rather than letting them rankle us. All those criticisms about the Web are still going around and are generally still true. We just don't let it bother us much anymore. As users, we don't think much about the Web anymore, we just get on and use it when we need to.

One day, virtual environments will be the same. We'll not let the hype make our decisions for us, and instead we'll just get on with things.

Tags: culture, opinion, second-life, virtual-worlds, web

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Vint Falken said on 10:43AM 11-29-2008

I can only imagine the frustration of the Belgian people when they will be forced to fill out their tax forms in "sophisticated 3D-environment". (in 30 years time, that is... )

;)

Iian said on 12:24PM 11-29-2008

I agree that "One day ... we'll just get on with things."

But I disagree that "We'll not let the hype make our decisions for us" That's just contrary to human nature, and virtual worlds are not going to change that.

SL and individual virtual world efforts will rise or fall on their ability to be relevant to the lives of users.

Todd Borst said on 1:37PM 11-29-2008

Well put Tateru. We are definitely still exploring ways to effectively use the virtual worlds. I simply wish there are more to choose from.

The web is not controlled by a single company that can shut down pieces at their whim.

Prokofy said on 2:27PM 11-29-2008

Make up your mind, Tateru. Are you defending SL from its detractors, or trashing it? Most days, you are haughtily trashing it. Why the flip-flop today?

One of the biggest, most fake, most downright *lying* claims of geeks is that "The Internet was filled with sex when it first got started so SL is like that, too."

It wasn't. I was there, too, at the beginning, working in a science foundation where people had the precursor of the Internet as we know it now, and I witnessed the birth of the World Wide Web from a number of offices. There was never, ever any of the sort of SL experience where flying penises are FORCED on you. There is a big, big BIG difference between *chosing to go to a web site* that has explicit sex on it, once you've heard of it or gotten the link, and *having that content showered on your head* as you land on a welcoming area or are just minding your business on your own page. There is NOTHING like that on the Internet, Tateru, never has been, and never will, where against your will, content comes flying right at you, in the round.

There's a horribly false and distorted notion that the early Internet was all sex, but I recall it as mainly being all about people sending pictures of their cats and sound WAV files. You're forgetting a very key part of this cultural development: these computers were in universities and officies, not homes. It took much longer for people to get PCs and adapt them at home. And the office environment was simply not one that easily lent itself to sending around pictures of penises. It didn't happen at anywhere near the level you claim, and it was nothing like SL.

Of course, it's all terribly exaggerated now in retrospect merely to somehow make an obscure point, that Virtual Worlds are not a flop, but merely in their "early days".

Perhaps a more apt comparison is to email. Every day, in every way, despite having numerous filters and blocks and spam protectors, we are all send content about "love muscles" and "making her scream". THAT is what is more like -- unwanted sexualized content and hard sell of drugs, etc. coming right at you in your mailbox although you have tried to block it.

Pavig Lok said on 6:53PM 11-29-2008

Having taught classes and had to deal with all the all the workstations being plagued by popup ads for hardcore porn, I must disagree with your assessment that folk can't attack you with a penis on the internet. :P

Prokofy said on 10:22PM 11-29-2008

Anyone who can't figure out how to block pop-up ads deserves what they get. And there weren't any pop-up ads back in the early days of the Internet -- duh.

Pavig Lok said on 11:04PM 11-29-2008

As you well know from checking your mail filters you're under attack from the email equivalent of flying penises on a daily basis. This happens on the web too - and when working under managed systems where you don't have the administrative privs to manage what content is blocked you are at the mercy of the IT department to be responsive.

Similarly in SL dealing with unwanted content is trivial if you have the privs to do it, just people don't yet exercise that administrative role particularly well. I can assure you several years ago unwanted porn appearing on theoretically firewalled university networks with managed desktops was a constant problem at several places I worked.

Though we deal with it rather better these days I can assure you the internet is right brimming with proactive porn and trolls just itching to derail any polite conversation one might wish to have in it's theoretically sedate corners. If you believe this wasn't always the case, you mustn't have spent much time in USENET forums :P

And to KevinL from memory alt.sex predates the release of the internet from academic hands... implying that perhaps academics had less cerebral interests on the net too :P

KevinL said on 7:19PM 11-29-2008

Couple of comments - first to the original article: That's all well and good, but the web was useful even in it's infancy to a degree that doesn't happen with virtual worlds. There was a reason to reach for your browser. Right now, pretty much no matter what I'm doing, I _don't_ reach for my second life client - or any other vw. That may change, but the fact that it hasn't yet suggests there's not yet a compelling reason to use vw's. Partially because the web does a decent job of it, partially because we have other tools such as audio/video conferencing. The web added something useful and compelling to gopher, I'm not 100% convinced yet that vw's add something useful and compelling to the web. Having said that, I remember saying something similar about the web vs gopher, too, so take it with a pinch of salt ;)

To the person saying the 'net wasn't filled with porn initially: It may depend on your pov. As someone who worked in an early ISP here in .au, I can say that a vast percentage of our traffic _was_ porn - and for a time, that was certainly the driving force behind the growth of the network. I certainly remember the pre-web days when actual information was king (although alt.sex.*'s been around long enough too ;), but porn played a pretty serious role in uptake and growth after it got out of the academic's hands.

KJL

Gwyneth Llewelyn said on 7:14AM 12-04-2008

Tateru, GREAT article! The blurb was excellent hehe — very provoking ;)

*waves* at Prok. Oh, btw, you surely certainly remember the days before pop-up blockers were available, and any clever porn spammer was, indeed, able to use a little primitive JavaScript to crash your browser with porn. In fact, those were the days before any kind of control existed on the Web at all. Or even any kind of search engines!

Even more irony... I also saw the first Web sites appearing in 1993 (there were a few before that, of course, but 1993 was the year that the first graphical browser was launched). The major difficulty back then was to think about what could be useful on the Web. My devious thinking came up almost instantly to do an "intranet application" for the research lab I was working with at that time (that was, of course, before the word "intranet" was coined). Believe me, it was a very tough sell, and ultimately, I was pushed out of that research lab because I was "being too ambitious" in pushing for change ;) It was... weird.

In those early days without search engines, the only thing that helped you to find new and interesting sites on the emerging Web was the "Yahoo List", which you subscribed by email and got every day with a list of new sites. It feels weird to imagine how crude that was, but it was the start of Yahoo...

And of *course* there was already porn on the Web. In fact, Web 2.0 started early in... 1996, when AdultFriendFinder.com, the first international dating service, went life. They're still around and still one of the largest dating services — because they had a good business model: a subscription service to allow you to reply back to your potential date, and, of course, web ads for porn, just like they have today. So as early as 1996 (at least), the porn business on the Web was blooming.

Like Second Life, however, porn is just a minor part of the online reality — about 20% of all content or so. Granted, in 1994-6, it seemed to be much more than that (like it seems to be much more in SL today) just because porn distributors were much more aggressively promoting their services. The same happens in SL today. I mean, in 1995 or 1996 you didn't get web ads for the Library of Congress Online (which had been online for ages...).

So, I'm sorry to disappoint you, Prok, but porn has been around on the Web since its dawn :) And the "usefulness" of the Web wasn't really seriously considered until Microsoft announced themselves to be an "Internet company" in late 1995 (after trying to bury the Internet in early 1995, and doing a 180º turn in their attitude after just 6 months). I'm glad you found the Web so "useful" from the very beginning, but you have to consider yourself very lucky — most of us had to struggle to get any kind of attention to it, and only geeks, futurists, borderliners, and, of course, porn distributors, really "believed" in a future where the World-Wide Web would be dominant. No one really believed that people would really buy CDs, music, or clothes online.

This year, for the first time in my life, I bought all my Christmas gifts online — through Amazon.com and an online clothes mail-order company. It took me at least 15 years to convince myself that it's pretty much pointless to spend hours jammed in the traffic and then elbowing with huge crowds to get some Christmas shopping done :) This year, at least, I've shopped in peace... :)

Viajero Pugillist said on 7:01AM 12-10-2008

God, doesn't P. ever clam up? So bitterly yet confidently full of it, distorting history and reality destructively, addictively, willy nilly, ad nauseum.

Flying penises are bad enough.