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Release the spiders!

Is my avatar really free?

I first logged into Second Life in April 2006, and in truth I wasn’t too impressed.  Since then my knowledge of Second Life has been determinedly second-hand, mostly from enthusiastic weekend broadsheets, anxious to impress, or the notorious Pop Bitch, a filthy e-rag that occasionally vomits diamonds into my inbox on a Thursday.
 

Last week my partner decided to try out Second Life (as a cultural experiment, you understand) and this has led to an avatar-as-time-share for the two of us. It quickly became clear to me that not much has changed.  Consumerism abounds, gambling, strip clubs, and all the aesthetics of bloated engenderment continue, whilst interesting enclaves appear increasingly off-limits.  This is barely worth reporting, save some insights afforded by Adam Curtis’ acerbic series of short films ‘The Trap: What happened to our dream of freedom’ on BBC 2.

Curtis examines the nature of modern liberty, and states that in an attempt to liberate us, Western governments have simply narrowed our choices and created a system where class and money mean everything.  In the final, most recent installment "We Will Force You To Be Free", Curtis focused particularly on the inheritance of Isiah Berlin‘s 1958 Two Concepts of Liberty.

I was particularly struck by the notion of Second Life as a form of actualised, and somewhat dehumanised Negative Liberty, in Curtis’ terms.  Democracy is not automatically rising through the individual cells inhabiting Second Life, and the ‘invisible hand’ of the Market is not driving the quality of my experience either.  In short, Second Life lacks meaning, and, I would argue, and the capacity for meaningful self expression.  Is my avatar really free?  Viva La Revolucion!

In November last year, Roger Geyer and Steve Whitaker (University of Virginia) discussed the notion of Perpetual Beta in the virtual classroom at the Universitas 21 conference on e-Learning and Pedagogy.  Whitaker and Geyer identify user-added value as one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0, and as discussed elsewhere this can be conceived as a huge paradigm shift for all involved.  It has seemed to me a sign of these fast moving times that some four months later we’re questioning whether Web 2.0 now spells the end universities in-house software development (Walk and Kelly, UKOLN, University of Bath).  A straw poll was conducted at the Shock of the Social 2007 conference, and the perhaps unsurprisingly (from a predominantly ‘in house’ crowd) the answer was a generally resounding ‘No’.  That said – it is clear the universities are anxious to appropriate, and in some respect re-sell the strengths of social networking technologies.  If the technologies themselves (folksonomies, wikis and so forth) are simply batched and integrated into students PLEs various concerns must be expressed.  Whilst this conglomerate offers a dynamic pitch to the university portal – in discussion – issues of branding and control of external services were weighed by delegates.  Implicitly, the accessibility of these technologies and universities responsibility to diverse student groups, (not to mention obligations to the DDA) mean these factors must be addressed from the outset.  MySpace has proven the potential horrors of user controlled content, and as accessibility discourse races to address the hype of 2.0, I realise I am still unaware of any large scale, funded accessibility research or audits of the pack leaders amongst the current student portfolio of Web 2.0 technologies.  We need a benchmark.