“Ten years ago, the Internet was the Wild West: you could barely go anywhere on the net and not hit a sex site,” Heider said. “Now, the Internet has really calmed down and become more mature as a medium. My kids can surf the net and not hit sex sites as easily.”
Right now, however, “Second Life is still the Wild West ,” Heider, who only shows Second Life to graduate students and not his undergrads, said. “There’s a lot of crazy stuff on there, a lot of sexual content.”
Heider said that the progressive influx of corporate sponsorship in Second Life has helped give the virtual world more stability.
“I think as Second Life exists and becomes more mature, the wild stuff will become less mainstream. There’ll be a tipping point where the wild stuff like sexual content will lose its novelty.”
Martinez also drew an analogy between Second Life and the net’s early days (of which companies like Bizooki need to take heed):
“You could go to a chat room and chat with a bunch of random people (in the early days of the Internet ),” Martinez said. “But not too many people wanted to go online and chat with a bunch a people they didn’t really know. That’s just not something that the average person would find consistently appealing.
“When AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) came along, people were able to talk more with their own friends and create buddy lists, which gave chatting more widespread appeal.”
Barefoot alluded that Second Life may have to make a similar leap towards user customization in order to become more popular and relevant.
“To me, (Second Life is) more like MySpace: people with like-minded interests about a particular thing,” Barefoot said. “I do think that if someone comes along and builds a better Second Life …then yeah, somebody’s gonna eat (their) lunch.
“Very few Web sites or technologies last more than five years.”
What does the unbundled economy look like today?
An increasing number of business have no employees. They are utilizing our 7 Untraditional Methods Of Spreading The Workload.
Industry # Businesses
Arts & Entertainment 1,034,453 — 88% have 0 employees
Construction 3,142,730 — 69% have 0 employees
Educator Organizations 481,036 — 83% have 0 employees
Health Care 2,196,905 — 63% have 0 employees
Science and Technical 3,460,008 — 73% have 0 employees
What will this look like in 2050?
Imagine an economy that is focused purely on application of specific talents. More organized, but gone will be the days of cubicle farms and the 8 to 5. We are experiencing more of this today, but truly, we are in for a wild ride.
* Source: U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy, based on data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. p.309
- Bizooki Networking
- Homeshoring
- Outsourcing
- Nearshoring
- Mom Sourcing
- Friend Sourcing
- Crowdsourcing
Traditionally, the macro social pattern for online employment has been to go to a site like Monster.com or CareerBuilder and post your resume, some things about yourself, what you’re looking for, etc.
In theory, the idea was that employers were going to work in conjunction with these sites and scour the resumes and miscellaneous info of their registered users increasingly more. In fact, it may even have worked for a time when the dot.com revolution was still en vogue around the turn of the millennium.
In reality, what you are essentially doing now with these sites is throwing a deliberately polished and packaged draft of who you are down the drain.
You waste several of your precious hours (Time=$$$, right?) every day, usually in painstaking obsession, one after another, carving and buffing customized presentations of who you are, complete with resume, cover letter, three references, a portfolio and a rectal exam, to coldly discriminating employers who have to sort through 6,783 different applications for their sole listing: “Corporate chum-scrubber.”
Maybe the dude with the Oxford degree will land an interview.
In reality , the result of the initial online employment prototype has been a systemic, gargantuan glut of information for the employers. In reality, such a basic networking system without giving a human face to all interested parties was permanent Web gridlock waiting to happen. In reality, the paradigm must be changed .
During times of such ineffective online job-searching gridlock, who you know is the only thing that matters. It is here where Bizooki is working to make its mark in easing the career gridlock of the rising generation of young professionals.
Many schools and work places have cordoned off access to sites like Facebook and MySpace because of their serpent-like lure to waste time in which you might otherwise be producing. Producing …for them!
In reality, sometimes your brain just needs a break. Studies show that you should take a five-minute break for every 20 minutes of actual work. How often in the daily grind do you get to take time for yourself and connect with someone or something that doesn’t remind you of your indentured working obligations?
“In my life/why do I give valuable time/to people who don’t care if I live or die?” Morrissey of The Smiths once wrote.
Bizooki aims to be a massive part of that change , a haven for you not only to be able to escape and talk to like-minded young professionals (and even more open-minded older ones) but to give those of you who refuse to be defined as “just another resume” a human face and a network of people who will respect you for who you are.
And hopefully, the more you are allowed to spread your wings for those interested in the tapestry of your total package, the more quickly you will be able to find and make opportunities in which you’ll thrive, personally and financially.
According to Heider , the primary Second Life audience is adults between the ages of 25 and 35, of eclectic races and genders, with heavy international consumption (which coincides with Bizooki’s target demographic ). As of a year ago, there were roughly 8 million registered Second Life accounts, but Heider estimated that with a likely number of multiple account users, there were probably between 4-5 million active users in the virtual world.
One of the generic debates raging on about Second Life is does a technologically-progressive concept like this virtual world add or detract from society ? More succinctly, does it offer yet another productive outlet/option for people to communicate or does it serve as another distraction in the way of leading a productive life?
“I’m not a big believer in the addictive effects of media,” Heider said. “The assumption that always goes with (Second Life ) is that (users would otherwise) be doing charity work and reading good novels, but it’s (usually) the same people who are watching Jerry Springer at home.
“I think (Second Life ) allows people to become socially connected in a way they wouldn’t be otherwise. It’s like anything else; people lived without physical contact with the outside world before there was an Internet.”
Au agreed that Second Life is “definitely…an avenue for people who are unable to socialize in a standard way.” He estimated that 10 percent of active users have some sort of handicap and that some of the most popular members of the virtual world have Asperger’s Syndrome , since “they tend be very socially empathic.
“People have these opportunities to flourish (on Second Life ) that they wouldn’t necessarily in the real world,” Au said. “You often have to have the right connections in the real world in order to succeed.
“Then you find out about some of these (Second Life success stories): …There’s this soldier who came back from Afghanistan with his kneecap blown off who is able to supplement his income by running a successful Second Life casino…There’s a nightclub called Wheelies and it’s run by a paraplegic .”
Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about Second Life is that this metaverse , or one like it , could set the tone for the future of online media convergence.
“I think (Second Life )’s going to be very important to the Internet in the next five years or so,” Au said. “There’s an argument that something like Second Life will be the next Internet. The web has only been commercially in use since about 1995. There are a lot of things you can’t do on a 2-D web that you can do on a 3-D web.”
What things, you might ask?
“What’s new about Second Life for architects is that they can build a building,” Heider said, “and then see how people congregate with the space, how people walked through the building.”
Au added, “If you want to buy furniture for your house and look at configurations of what it looks like and how it will fit in your house from different angles.”
Martinez noted, “If I wanted to go to the Second Life version of amazon.com and literally go around and browse a virtual bookstore, that would be neat.”
Tech consultancy company Gartner, whose “Hype Cycle” has measured Second Life adoption, has predicted that 80 percent of active Internet users will be in non-gaming virtual worlds like Second Life by the end of 2011. While Martinez doesn’t really care to use Second Life himself, he said he can easily see something like the virtual world becoming the next phase of media.
“The more (a product) enables the average person to do something they’re already doing but (makes it) easier, then more people will get them. It’s about convenience.”
As a self-anointed history buff, I’m always fascinated when I hear labels given to different generations. From ‘The Lost Generation’ of the early decades of the 20th century to ‘Generation X’, the somewhat illusory distinctions separating these groups of human beings, who just happen to be born into different sets of circumstances, baffles me.
Most specifically, I selfishly balk at the exalted status so freely given (and immortalized in Tom Brokaw’s book ) to ‘The Greatest Generation’, the group of Americans who grew up during the Great Depression and completed their coming-of-age during World War II. I asked a fellow history buff, my father, “Why are they so deserving of that title? What did they do that we couldn’t do?”
“Well, it’s just because of the extraordinary circumstances they were put through and overcame.”
It’s not that I feel this generation didn’t earn their meritorious title…but where’s the respect given to those of us not thrust into such infamously soul-hardening situations? How would we have responded?
Our parents, the ‘Baby Boomers’, had their share of excitement, too. From Woodstock to Wall Street, they witnessed several major American socio-political assassinations in the ’60s (including a pair of Kennedy siblings and several of our greatest African-American civil rights leaders ), either fought during or protested against the psyche-destroying madness of Vietnam , and ultimately began raising us during the fiscal boom of Reaganomics.
In the past few years, there have been web programs similar to Second Life which have flourished at times. However, much of the reason Second Life has grown , according to those interviewed, is that this world offers a level of freedom that the others (up until only recently) don’t.
“ It’s a distinct thing to understand because Second Life is all user-created content,” Au said. “Some of the land and houses were created by the company, but 99.9% of everything you see in there is created by users. ”
Heider added, “People would go to The Sims Online and they would create their own little role-play that EA did not want and people did it anyway. But Second Life encouraged those same behaviors…a lot of people came to Second Life from The Sims Online and There.com because they felt there was more freedom in Second Life .”
Linden Labs also lets Second Life users keep the intellectual property rights to whatever they create inside the virtual world.
Second Life celebrated its fifth birthday in late June , although it has only started to garner the majority of its registered audience in the past couple years. Though a toddler in human years, the virtual world has already been around long enough to make a significant impact in many careers and in the way people interact worldwide.
Don Heider, who has been researching Second Life for three-and-a-half years for his forthcoming book Living Virtually: Researching New Worlds (Release Date: September), originally stumbled across Second Life in the Austin-American Statesman while on faculty at The University of Texas.
“As a social scientist, it blew my mind,” Heider said. “It’s like the world’s biggest Petri dish…a very interesting social experiment.
“There’s no goal, there’s no game. It just exists to create and socialize…Any social scientist would like to put 100 random people on an island and see what they’d do, and this is what (Second Life ) was.”
Wagner James Au , whose Second Life alter ego is Hamlet Linden , also studies many of the sociological aspects of the virtual world. The co-author of Second Life: The Official Guide blogged for Linden Labs and freelanced stories for other publications from SL ’s early days until he left L.L. in Feb. 2006. Though he has been busy working independently on the Making of… novel (See: last Everywhere post ) since then, Au said he typically spends “anywhere from a few hours to 20 hours” a week logged into Second Life .
“From a social engineering standpoint, you can rate people, either through their behavior or their avatar behavior,” Au said. “Instead of going around killing orcs, you just go around being yourself.
“It’s always been a job for me, the most fun writing time I’ve ever had, but what made me stay was the unlimited amount of creativity that people are allowed to bring into the world. Also, the way people rip off each other’s creativity and feed off each other.”
One of the most direct influences for Second Life and programs like it, according to Second Life creator Philip Rosedale, is the concept of a “metaverse”, an idea pioneered by “cyberpunk” author Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash that describes a “user-defined world of general use where people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate.”
Don Heider , associate dean and associate professor of the College of Journalism at The University of Maryland, thinks that chat rooms from the Internet’s early days played an even bigger role in the development of programs like Second Life than video games.
“In terms of the way graphics and avatars move, games like World of Warcraft were more directly influential,” Heider said, “but early in the history of the Internet, people would log onto the Internet and use MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon, Domain, or Dimension) as gathering places to talk about things like Dungeons and Dragons.
“(These were) multi-participant bulletin board chat rooms where people would come together and interact that just used text but described their environments in such a detailed and complex way. I think these chat rooms probably played more of an influential factor, set more of a historic precedent than any of the current MMO RPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games).”
However, the evolution of video games also played a large role as well, especially since many of the technological-social concepts in Snow Crash were not practically applicable upon the book’s release in 1992. Around this time, computer game series such as SimCity (The Sims series) and Civilization were starting to gain popularity for their strategic PC simulations of urban and anthropological development. Early role-playing video games, such as the Final Fantasy series , were also evolving.