A Brief History of Second Life

Reading Tom Boellstorff’s chapter on the history of Second Life helped me wrap my head around virtual worlds and where we can expect them to go. He suggests that this shift to more virtual encounters with people is a natural progression. After all, technology has historically changed how we interact with others – writing, telegraphs, telephones, email, and the like are all ways in which technology shapes our lives. The rise of electronic mass media in the late 19^th Century using those mediums is responsible for the growth of alternate worlds – for example, films and later television facilitated the visualisation of alternate realities. Even fiction such as Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia shows us that experiencing life through cyberspace is not a necessarily new concept – it uses a new medium analogous with the development of more sophisticated telecommunications. The rise of artificial realities such as Videoplace as early as the 1970s. This kind of technology gave way video games, which Boellstorff cites as the precursor to virtual worlds like SL. The development of the Internet since the 1960s is also an integral part of developing virtual worlds as it provides the grounds for mass socialisation that programs such as The Sims could not initially meet. 

Second Life brings together very complex and Aristotelian concepts of technology and techniques. That is, humans have the means to transform their lives and their surroundings through their creativity. This understanding of culture shows us that virtual communities spring from old forms of developing humanity. On the other hand, as Boellstorff points out most interestingly, it is developing in a way unlike any previous social development. Indeed, this coexistence of ideas can be overwhelming, but it also makes understanding the anthropological developments of Second Life much more manageable. These theories put SL development into a macro and micro sociological perspective, which to me develops a more complete picture of what we can expect as librarians working in a unique context.