Semiotics in Second Life

September 22, 2008 haleyb

In class on Wednesday we put of topics for studying second life to the test. My group had semiotics, we basically just took pictures of interesting/different things (mostly people). It was weird to think about after the fact because before we took part in the study we were warned that some other avatars might not like having their picture taken when in second life and could get mad. At first i was thinking that was dumb of them, that its just a little virtual world and really just one animated person taking a picture of the other. After reading and thinking about chapter 3 in “coming of age in second life” however, if you think of it in terms of “actual” reality; how would i feel if i was shopping at the mall or walking on campus and someone can up and took a picture of me out of nowhere for their own research purposes..creeped out.  I understand that there are little things like that on second life that needs to be taken into consideration because for some people, they take their virtual world seriously and taking a snapshot of them and emailing it to oneself could be intrusive in their opinion. I did have fun taking pictures of the scenery and stuff around the different worlds of second life. There are just so many weird and interesting things to see. I tried teleporting to other worlds, I typed in “Hollywood” and it looked like i was in some kind of ghost town-no other avatars or really anything but me for that matter and it was dark out. I was able to get to the Sunset Strip in Hollywood so my avatar could do some shopping, and there were other avatars and shops there (not like the freebie shops unfortunetly) but it was still dark out..that confused me!! I looke forward to teleporting to other second life worlds and comparing the lifestyles to one another.

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