Is Second Life a valuable tool for activism, or largely a waste of time and money?
Reporter/film-maker Josh Levy has produced a thoughtful and thought-provoking web video chronicling his experiences investigating the potential of Second Life as a tool/platform for activism. It’s well worth checking out - both by online campaigners looking to better understand how to link SL into their advocacy work, and also by Second Life aficionados who want to inject some more meaningful content into their virtual lifestyles.
Levy explores a series of virtual landscapes, including virtual Capitol Hill, Better World island, and Camp Darfur. He discusses activism motivations and learnings directly with some of the creative minds/hands behind these virtual landscapes and venues, and wraps up with own impressions on the potential for Second Life to be a venue for activism.
One observation Levy makes is that despite its “billing” as a world where many thousands of people interact, the Second Life experience is often lonely, and experiences are personalized rather than shared. This is most profoundly true in his visit to Camp Darfur, which is modeled more as a museum exhibit or monument than as an immersive experience in a virtual refugee camp. The concept of virtual museum/monument may be a more comfortable lens for understanding the potential of Second Life as a motivator/catalyst for activism, and links to another of Levy’s observations that experiences in SL can be emotionally engaging as well as informative. It may be that this is a valuable direction for activist organizations to consider in approaching Second Life - to start from the emotional code of their campaigns, and follow that path of engagement - building virtual monuments or exhibits.
Virtual monuments already exist - see http://www.annefranktree.com/ for a powerful example that invites people to create a virtual tree leaf in Anne Frank’s memory, and read the leaves placed by others - more than 130,000 so far.
Giving individuals a place to tell their own stories is a powerful means to capture emotional content that can deepen the meaning of a campaign and help people make a personal connection with an issue, and there seem to be some very good opportunities in Second Life for this kind of presentation. One of the venues that Levy visits (the Peace and Justice Center) contains a collection of individual notes and personal stories about people affected by the Iraq War, and another location has a field full of signs erected by a wide variety of people and causes - both good opportunities for allowing visitors to make their own statements.
To view Josh Levy’s movie A Better World in Second Life?, visit: http://www.levjoy.com/betterworld
