On the weekend it happened that I read a very critical article on Second life by Jenny Diski published in the »London Review of Books«. And this morning I found on Steve Rubels blog the link to the unofficial Apple store in Second Life. Therefore I decided to add my lightweight notion to this topic. But have a look on the store first. It gives a good impression about what Second Life seems to be.
Is it a mere copy of real life, or has it got some extra innovative pull? I cannot see it. It is 3-d animation, it is a marketplace, an amusement park, very stereotyped, very plastic… herewith I agree very much with writer Jenny Diski. Second Life is clean, it is mostly purged from impurity, from imperfectness. This is obviously what we are all dreaming about. Does it proove that Hollywood is gearing our dreams or that Hollywood guesses our dreams or both… or ?
In Second Life we can easily rid ourselves from the signs of aging and disease, if we are short, we can grow tall, if our legs are too short, if our breasts are too, our lips etc. etc… at the end we look all very similar in Second Life…
In somehow it is scary how streamlined our fantasies are. Is there this crave in all of us to live in a never ending commercial of beauty and happiness?
When I first was confronted with Second Life I felt this pressure in me, like »my god, perhaps you have to jump on this bandwagon with biestmilch.com not to loose track«. I am sobered now. I think it is a fashion that is going to collapse one day, a hype that is going to decline because at the end Second Life is too boring, because it is lacking all we need: the haptic approach to life, the real stuff like taste, smell, the emotions that relations to the real world be it human or non-human provoke. I am happy that I came to this conclusion. It saves us a lot of time, we can now invest into real life.
