There is an interesting conversation of sorts taking place between Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky and Beth Coleman about Second Life, what Beth calls a “3X3 posting”. Each has drawn a line in the sand re: SL on their respective blogs in response to an earlier, some would say contentious, post by Shirky about the skewed membership numbers and inflated use of Second Life as reported by Linden Labs. While Shirky’s shot over the bow caused the SL discussion boards to light up with ALL CAP denunciations of his comments as abject heresy, his comments, whether you agree or disagree, have generated a much-needed discussion about the real value of SL and what the future of virtual worlds in general hold for entertainment, communication, and education.
Shirky sees SL as another in a long line of overhyped technologies, like MOOs and MUDs, that eventually end up in the innovation junkyard–or at least remain niche applications, “of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try it.” While Shirky admits that there are very interesting activities happening in SL, his argument basically focuses on numbers, and the fact that SL’s supposed low adoption rate bodes ill for something being billed by many as Web 3.0.

The logic behind this belief is simple: most people who try Second Life don’t like it. Something like five out of six new users abandon it before a month is up. The three month abandonment figure seems to be closer to nine out of ten. (This figure is less firm, as it has only been reported colloquially, with no absolute numbers behind it.)

More importantly, the current active population is still an unknown. (Call this metric something like “How many users in the last 30 days have accounts more than 30 days old?”) We know the highest that figure could be is in the low hundreds of thousands, but no one other than the Lindens (and, presumably, their bigger marketing clients) knows how much lower it is than this theoretical maximum.

The poor adoption rate is a form of aggregate judgment. Anything bruited for wide adoption would have trouble with 85%+ abandonment, whether software or toothpaste. One possible explanation for this considerable user defection might be a technological gap. I do not doubt that improvements to the client and server would decrease the abandonment rate. I do doubt the improvement would be anything other than incremental, given 5 years and tens of millions in effort already.

Jenkins is less interested in the numbers and more interested in SL’s unique participatory culture.

The numbers matter if we are asking whether Second Life represents “the future of the web” but personally, I have never believed that SL is going to be a mass movement in any meaningful sense of the term. As I stated last time, I do not buy the whole nonsense that immersive worlds represent web 3.0 and will in any way displace the existing information structures that exist in the web, any more than I think audio-visual communications is going to replace written communications anytime soon…(snip) I do not even think that Second Life represents the future of multiplayer games — it represents one end of a spectrum of player experiences which maximizes player generated content and minimizes the prestructured experiences we associate with most computer games. World of Warcraft represents the other end of that spectrum and so far, that model draws more customers. My own ideal lays perhaps some place in the middle. As such, this becomes a debate not about affordances but about the desirability of professional entertainment versus the pleasures of participatory culture. It also becomes an exercise in mapping what some have described as the pyramid of participation in which the harder it is to create content, the higher the percentage of participants who will chose to consume content someone else has produced. What’s striking to me is not that so many people still prefer to consume professionally generated content (it has always been thus) but what a growing percent of people are willing to consume amateur content and what a smaller but still significant percentage of people are willing to generate and share content they produced themselves. Second Life interests me as a particular model of participatory culture.

Coleman is still somewhat cautious about SL, but more optimistic than either Jenkins or Shirky about its future. She calls for more rigorous measurement of SL use and user engagement–for collecting the real SL data that Shirky says is currently lacking–but also sees in SL parallels to the early Web, another innovation whose imminent failure many prognosticators wrongly predicted.

I guess mutant-indie-minority culture is not what it used to be. OK, perhaps the future tense of virtual world development will not be dominated by radical experimentation in nation building and identity play. The cyber-strip joints will get moved to the periphery of town as it were. There is a civilizing mission going on, but it is not from the top down.

These are worlds made by user-generated-content. The “world gods” have provided the code, servers, and procedural aspects. On these collaborative grids, world building is done in the image of its users: us. This stage of open-ended development parallels, in many respects, the early moments in the popularization of the Internet. The shift from multi-format Internet to World Wide Web, with its html code, coincided with a population of net citizens represented by an explosion of individual Web pages. In the mid ‘90s, people had doubts that this “e-commerce thing” would work. Uh, guess it caught on.

Like Jenkins, Coleman also sees the value of SL’s shared social space. While Jenkins doesn’t see us spending too much time in these virtual spaces, Coleman apparently thinks we could come to see them as intimate locations, as homes:

What virtual worlds promise is an augmentation of human-to-human communication. We seem to yearn for synchronous connectivity and virtual worlds promise to deliver exactly that. Looking at the 150-year build out of telecommunications capabilities, what we find with many of the current platforms from text message to instant messaging to virtual worlds are designs for simultaneous connectivity. Putting a human face to things is a lot of what this is about, even if that human face is a codebot. These platforms are not simply to facilitate shopping but to develop further (or perhaps more massively) the ways in which virtual and “portable” spaces can be inhabited as a home.

Like Shirky, I too see the success of SL partly as a diffusion issue, especially regarding using it as a platform for formal and informal learning. I have noticed real disconnect between novice users’ ideas about using SL, which are usually pretty enthusiastic and full of promise, and their actual use of SL–actually logging in, building, becoming expert users. For novice users, it quickly becomes apparent that to do the things they want to do in SL requires them to either commit lots of time inworld, or else commit lots of money–to buy the things they don’t otherwise have time to build themselves. Perhaps some of this disconnect has to do with my age, and the ages of those who seem enthusiastic about SL but never get around to trying it out.
But, regardless of SL’s viability, it has opened up new possibilities in the ways we interact with each other, and enlarged our concepts of identity, ownership and collaboration. The deeper structures that SL is built on I think will last, even outlast SL itself, where a visit 10 years from now will reveal a world of sandy ruins, decorated with the sun-bleached bones of long-dead avatars (all 3000 of them).