Ch. 6 Coming of Age in Second Life

Chapter 6 in Coming of Age in Second Life delt with areas of lauguge, friendship, love, family, and addiction as it pertains to Second Life.  I found the friendship section to be the most intersting or most intriging.  The Author talks about how in his studies he came across an indiviudual who stated that they have amny online friends but they don’t have any motivation to contact eachother outside of Second Life.  I found this interesting because Second Life too these people is truley another life to them.  People can have a completely different identity and a completely different set of friends from thier actual-world life.  It makes second life more real to me in the sense that people are able to strike up friendsships like this and maintian them and even fall in love in second life!  The author futher states that resisdents feel that their frienships online are just as real if not more real than actual life frienshipos becuase in the virtual world a frienship is more predicated upon getting ot know someone from ” the inside out” instead of the “outside in.”  The author quotes a resdent that says: ” When you meet someone online and you don’t have the whole real-world enviroment…you get to know someone’s personality on a much greater level.”  I feel this is an important concept becuase it is easy to judge people by appearance in the real world, but it seems, at least in my own expirence, that people (or avatars) in second life don’t judge by appeance much.  Sure, i have commented on how some avatars are strange looking, but i don’t really beieve that someone is a dragon or a superhero sitting on the computer controling the avatr, I see it as something fun, humerous, or an creative expression of the person.  In addtion, the chapter talks about how stricking up a frienship online with other people across the world is an inportant factor or compelling feature of second life and pther online commubities. It is in that social space in which many new concepts and vaules can be shared amoung people of different backgrounds that wouldn’t meet each other or have the oppurtunity to in the actual world.