Tuesday, August 26, 2008

The right type of hype


The University of Leipzig has just published research on the attitude of youths to, among other things, Second Life. The study found out that 80 percent of the 1000 youths questioned during research knew of SL, but two thirds of those who had not yet entered the virtual world weren’t even interested in doing so.

What people reporting about the research appear to be overlooking is that it was done with youths between 11 and 20. Technically only those above 18 years of age can actually register with SL. But, as we all know from those “How r u, wanna dance, rofl, do u liek my lazersword?”-IMs, this is, sadly, not the case.

Recently, in fact yesterday afternoon, an acquaintance mentioned to me that the “hype of SL is a thing of the past” and then, even more recently, in fact yesterday evening, a friend IM’d me asking what had happened to the Jazz Club Hot Sax. At first (and in a moment of extreme panic) I though she meant it had disappeared. But what she meant was that it was almost empty of people.

This has all put me on the defensive - pretty much in the manner of someone who has been a regular guest in, let’s say, the hot spot in a smaller town and suddenly discovers that the place isn’t rocking as it used to. You’ve got two choices: Either you join the crowd of nay-sayers and add your voice to their chorus; or you sniff loudly and start pretending you didn’t want all of those other dumb people in the club anyway and finally, finally, things are getting back to where they should be before all those flighty, finical and fastidious strangers showed up.

I, for my part, am quite happy to take the latter attitude.

Still, I do wonder. Last Sunday SL reached 67335 users online at one time. I know that so exactly because I wasn’t one of them and had that number up on the login screen for quite a while. If SL is a club that isn’t that popular anymore, I wished they’d tell that to the other 67333 people (I need at least one other person, preferably Tia, to be logged in as well). If SL isn’t as popular as it used to be, I wish it would stop being so full.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

hot sax is empty cos the music is rubbish now!!
MP x

Emeraldmist Nightfire said...

Obviously there are people in SL, but experience has taught me that places seem to be subject to rapid changes in the whims of fad and fashion. Whether or not that is good depends on what you are looking for--a social opportunity or a nice low lag environment :).

Emeraldmist Nightfire said...

For more virtual food for thought (not directly related to this post), you may want to read this:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/08/the-second-li-1.html

Rhett said...

I have found many of my fav places to have closed and vanished and few buddies MIA...