Life 2.0

Second Life documentary Life 2.0 took Sundance by storm and is the subject of this article, "Second Life, Better than the First?" featuring an interview with filmmaker Jason Spingarn-Koff. The implications of co-existing realities and the way in which we create ourselves when all options are possible is at the core of Second Life's power.

To me, it's less about whether Second Life is better than life in the physical world and more about how meaningful experimentation in Second Life can lead to greater understanding of self, community and social systems.

In the past three years, I've worked in a personal and professional capacity on many different types of projects in Second Life with IBM, Manpower, Linden Lab, the American University in Cairo and the US State Department, PROBOSCIS, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and many more.

During my first week in Second Life, I met a Muslim woman in a Jewish synagogue who told me that she'd been curious all her life about what happens during prayer services, yet felt that she would be persecuted or at the very least make other people uncomfortable if she showed up at a synagogue in the physical world. I knew immediately that there would be no going back from this development--the ability to create and collaborate on *anything* you can imagine and share that three-dimensional space with people from all over the world.

My exploration of culture in Second Life also led me to a strapping green avatar with dredlocks named Schmilsson Nilsson, created by Joshua S. Fouts, who was at the time directing the Center on Public Diplomacy, a think-tank that he founded at the University of Southern California. In the time since, we've worked together in four continents in the physical world and across the digital culture as a whole to raise awareness about this unprecedented opportunity to truly understand something entirely new about individual and cultural identity.

So much fear stems from worrying about how others will perceive us if we behave in a way that goes against conditioned social expectation. Second Life is a complex and beautiful experimental lab for creating a more evolved state of cultural and economic development, not to mention the development of self. In 2007, when the New York Times profiled my company, Dancing Ink Productions, I realized that my office in Second Life, sparse and well-designed, did not match my office in the physical world, which was more an art studio filled with drawings, pencils, paint, collage scraps, musical instruments and books. I cleaned the entire studio out, organized everything and reinvented the space for the photograph.

It was then that I realized that avatars, for some, are an opportunity to play out a fantasy, such as the desire to be a vampire. For others, however, self-created avatars are an opportunity to design new concepts of self and community for meaningful participation in the physical world. This is, of course, a dangerous concept, which is why society is built around rules and expectation to keep people from thinking too much about why things are the way they are. Stopping and thinking often leads to trouble. Stopping and creating an entirely new concept of what it means to be a conscientious global citizen, however, as well as to take action in crafting one's own life and career at a time of economic and cultural transformation, has become a necessity as well as a strategic advantage.

In the past three years I've worked in dozens of platforms within the digital culture, but the special creative power of Second Life dazzles me every time I participate in a moment of indescribable beauty that real people take the time to create. While I have spent a great deal of time in the media, at meetings and at events defending Second Life, I've come to realize that the level of creativity required to envision a deeper reality is overwhelming to some--a fear that often manifests in disgust or ridicule. Such people run the risk of becoming casualties in the new economy.