In Chapter 7 of the book, the author talks about community, and all that it entails in secondlife.  It is a virtual community where people from all over can meet, chat and become friends.  This particular chapter goes into detail about secondlife events and groups, ass well as what it means to be portray kindness on secondlife and the meaning of griefing.  Lastly the chapter discusses between virtual worlds and beyond such virtual worlds.

An event on secondlife is something that a particular person sets up where several other users meet up for some sort of particular social gathering, whether it is to discuss something, for entertainment purposes, or a party, etc…  Events are just one way that residents of secondlife could interact with one another.  When you look at the map on secondlife, the areas where there were large clusters of green dots signified that their were a lot of people in that particular area and usually meant that some sort of event could be taking place.  Sometimes certain events were not open to the public because it was limited to guests that were strictly invited, such as a wedding.  Groups on secondlife were different from events in that an event was hosted at a certain time and place, whereas one could be a member of a group for as long as they wish.  “Groups could be organized around almost anything, including places, topics, and identity categories” (pg. 184).

The next sections discussed kindness and griefing.  Kindness on secondlife from my experiences was very noticeable and It benefited how I viewed secondlife immensely.  The kindness that I saw to be most beneficial to me was freebies.  Without them, I wouldn’t have anything since I haven’t completely realized how to earn lindens yet.  Other acts of kindness were other users giving out information to newbies on things such as opening boxes and trying on clothes.  I have been invited to join several groups as well as attend several events, which has helped me feel more welcome in the secondlife world.  Griefing on the other hand, is when users sign up on a virtual world, not just secondlife, and deliberately try to interfere with other secondlife residents experiences.  Griefing could come in the form of harassment, such as verbal, sexual or stalking someone.  Another form of griefing is through “unattractive builds…extreme examples of this included gigantic sex organs or sexually explicit images on the sides of buildings” (pg. 189).  Other examples could be faulty advertising.  Something that I wasn’t aware you could do on secondlife was to shoot someone.  Doing this apparently could cause an avatar to be thrown so far away that it could take several hours to come back to where they were and would ultimately cause the user to have to restart the program.  Some ways to avoid griefers would be to teleport away from them, mute them, report them or even ban them from a particular area.

Secondlife isn’t the only online community to exist in our society, and in this section the author explores this further.  Just as one could have several avatars within secondlife, they could also have self-hoods in multiple virtual worlds.  One such world is World of Warcraft, which the author explains to be a virtual world that is centered around role-play and combat.  Virtual diaspora is a term that means when a particular virtual world goes out of existence, residents of that world enter other virtual worlds together (pg. 197).  Beyond secondlife existed numerous other sites that were not secondlife, however related to the world.  Blogs and forums existed where people could talk about secondlife.  The author describes that during his studies of secondlife he found that there were many activities held in secondlife that were to raise awareness and money for actual world activities.  Another way to go beyond the virtual world was to meet friends from secondlife in the actual world.