Snarky Shirky, or Why the Geeks Got to Go
Not just binary data...elves in Second Life's ElvenGlen helped raise more than $100 US in an hour at a live concert for charity with two popular inworld singers supported by people from a variety of countries and time zones; the donations came from inworld virtual businesses.
I've taken Clay Shirky on before -- with his concept of the "Group As Its Own Worst Enemy" -- the soul of the group is in fact more often than not the enemy of a rapidly, changing, dynamic "group" like the "community" of people using SL.
And by the same token, while a welcome deflation of hype on the sign-ups, Clay's petulant dismissal of Second Life today as a phenomenon is rooted in a deeply-held tekkie bias that increasingly we are coming to see the basis for: let's call it something like "Vietnam Syndrome" -- and call it "Dot.com Syndrome".
Every tekkie like Shirky who was here for Web 1.0 and the dot.com insanity wants to be the first to demonstrate his expertise and tell you about the dangers of bubbles; inflated numbers of traffic; churn; the evils of being a walled garden like AOL; the horrors of being uncool like Geocities -- the menu list of material for Hectoring Homilies is very long.
That's because many of these now-not-so-young men (and they're mainly men) made their careers during the glory days of the early and burgeoning World Wide Web, and some of them got very stung, or watched others get burned. Their collective historical memory is now in the way of perceiving the new phenomenon of Web 2.0 or Web 3.D as Mark Walace calls it.
We're all going to have to walk pretty briskly around them.
Increasingly, I've become aware of this deep, deep problem of the geeks and their turning up their noses at SL.
First, within SL itself, I found the vasty deep problem of the FIC, the feted inner core (Shirky's inner core which would find the larger group its enemy) -- the programmers and scripters and technically sophisticated who were the early adapters -- or as I like to call them, adopters (given how proprietary they can seem).
They are endlessly cynical and dismissive of those technically challenged enough to find that in 4 hours of Second Life, they don't learn how to fly, much less learn how to put two prims together.
I honestly get scared, sometimes, coming up for air in first life and talking to a colleague, trying to explain what it has taken me 2 years to learn -- how to enter Second Life and land somewhere and then mount a project. There's a BIG gap in learning.
Still, that really isn't the point. The learning curve, the technical considerations, or the hype.
The Good News about Second Life is that it is NOT for geeks and the vast majority of users of the program -- even to the bewilderment of Linden Lab, which would like to keep the software cards close to their chests -- are not tekkies and not even especially computer savvy.
The extraordinary compelling nature of a 3-D world that you can jump into and script, cast, prop, and narrate yourself -- not sitting passively in front of a television set or movie theater; a world where you can make at least some simple items and marvel at how they sell -- or resell others or manipulate items you've bought from others who made them -- it's extraordinarily intriguing.
At it's not about those most basic activities, sex -- and the even more popular activity -- shopping. There are many deeply satisfying creative experiences to be had in SL.
Geeks who sneer at people who shop, or drive SUVs (as they imagine), or have cybersex online, are going to be Missing the Moment if they can't get past the mass culture -- in fact that's just it, there's a mass-culture-in-the-making that they aren't seeing, and (thank God!) aren't controlling.
Of course the next generation of mainly young men, but increasingly many young women, too, don't have the scar tissues from Web 1.0 and just keeping coming to SL. While they have heard the war stories, they don't worry about it because they are *already making money*. When college kids in their 20s can make money as seriously as enough to pay for their apartments or even tuitions, and when young people starting out can actually spend all day online and actually be *getting* a life, not fleeing the absence of a life, then you know you are dealing with something quite impressive.
That "impressive" isn't big companies or VC biggies making boatloads -- that's not the story. The story is about *the rest of us this time being the ones to make the money*. Starting to get it now?
When I talk to official geeks at my RL jobs or in various international venues, I find the condescending half-smiles; the shrugs of wonder that people would like moving an avatar around; the dismissals that it can scale. The favourite thing of the naysayers is to tell you that not only is it all built on old crappy engines, it can't scale. It's a good thing that the Lindens are so imaginitive and so persistent in their nearly cult-like intensity to make this thing work, so that they can walk around all those robots that would have killed them and their project long ago. It's hard enough to be Marconi; it's even harder to have been Tesla.
Shirky's essay doesn't even have to be long on real field-tested analysis (I've never heard of him even coming to Second Life; he doesn't appeared to have glanced at the economics stats page); it's enough for him, with his street cred, to begin whining about all the huge hype. I'm a big debunker of the hype, too. Yet the spirit of what is happening in Second Life is being missed in the welter of analysis about fake sign-up numbers and cludgy technology.
The fact is that Second Life represents a new form of emotional bandwidth, as Pathfinder Linden and others have called it, that indicates new forms of communication that might become a medium as well as a message: not that we are all one with hands across the sea -- that is so last century, which was actually chock-full of genocides -- but that even with our very real and deep differences, we can communicate *better* through shared expression, building, projects, and interactivity outside the boundaries of space, time, physical appearance, and even race or gender.
People forget that the avatar has reliably been found to be a window to the soul; and that communion of the souls is possible in SL in ways that aren't so religious as to be off-putting, nor so hippy-dippy as to be meaingless. It's real.
A snarky statement like, "August 1996 may well go down in the annals of the Internet as the turning point when the Web was released from the 2D flatland of HTML pages. Oops." -- misses the fact that for some years now, we've all been released already from 2-D flatland not only of HTML pages, but of 2-D Sims Online. We're in the 3-D world now whether in Second Life, World of Warcraft, or even just a flash shopping mall image on a commercial site. It's here. And more of it is coming. And the secret geeks don't like about it is that *we can all use it easier, faster, and better -- because we can make our own stuff in it.*
THAT is what is prompting the sneers -- the unconscious fear that geeks just may not be as necessary as they once were. Oh, to be sure, the will still pwn the servers and the code that runs it -- but inside the world, users don't need to wait around for game gods to add new features; they make them themselves, in ways that, to be sure, range from amateur to professional -- but just as in the rest of RL, if they are not competent tekkies increasingly they can hire the help they need outworld from start-up companies or inworld from fellow residents willing to take Lindens, depending on the kind of project.
Imagine this, geeks! Without any HTML, without any computer programming, without any especially serviceable skills in math, I can rent and operate sims and provide land and homes and events for hundreds of people -- just by joining SL, reading the instructions, getting some lessons, and working through trial and error. Oh, I know you'd like me to be paying you $50/hour for this fascinating experience, but instead, that kind of money is what I can make myself in day from my business -- and others with more time, and younger, and especially females in their 30s (according to the demographics) are paying themselves much more than that from their creations.
This is going to cause a tremendous shake-up in your world. And that's why you don't like it, and that's why you are constantly picking at it, snarking at it, and trying to diminish its capacity. It's big. And will get bigger. And I say this as a very fierce critic of Lindens and Second Life.
Everyone will be having a Second Life, as easily as they have a second car, job, house, wife, chance. It won't be for the very poor who don't have the hook-ups -- but then much of what is in the Western world isn't accessible to the poor, and that was true of not only the Internet, but even of colour television in the 1960s.
Says Shirky,
Most reporters don’t remember that anyone has ever wrongly predicted a bright future for immersive worlds or flythrough 3D spaces in the past, so they have no skepticism triggered by the historical failure of things like LambdaMOO or VRML. Instead, they hear of a marvelous thing — A virtual world! Where you have an avatar that travels around! And talks to other avatars! — which they then see with their very own eyes. How cool is that? You’d have to be a pretty crotchety old skeptic not to want to believe. I bet few of those reporters ever go back, but I’m sure they’re sure that other people do (something we know to be false, to a first approximation, from the aforementioned churn.) Second Life is a story that’s too good to check.
And as I said, for young people, or newly-enabled and tekkified old people, especially women and non-Americans who have taken to SL by leaps and bounds, these old fuddy-duddy concerns like "skepticism triggered by the historical failure of things like LambdaMOO or VRML" don't compute. What the hell is LambadaMOO? I never heard of it until I branched out from SL into geek-world; I'm certain I wouldn't recognize VRML if it bit me in the ass; but I have a full and engaging Second Life.
As for reporters -- ack, they are superficial and don't come back. But we're now dealing with a very intriguing reality -- a big news media corporation like Reuters as well as CNET and Axel Springer have now moved into SL for the duration.
"What do you mean Reuters and Harvard is *in* Second Life?" a colleague asked me today in confusion. For her Harvard or Reuters was *on* the Internet with information pages and a few pictures; what would it mean for Reuters to be *in* something. I explained and sent the screenshots.
The excitement that people feel when they open up a window that used to only push media at them, which now becomes a pull-media drawing them and their creative impulses into an interactive 3-D world, does indeed spread like wildfire. And like wildfire, it will skip many streams and rocks that simply cannot catch on due to technical or perceptional problems (like the blinkered geeks living their old war stories). The wildfire will leap back and catch them later.
Why does it capture people's imagination? Because they can make and use and manipulate things as soon as they imagine them; Philip, who is as geeky as they get, outlined this dream of his when he described his past at SLCC in August 2006.
All Shirky can say (like Raph Koster) is, "All the good intentions in the world won’t confer atomicity on binary data."
Oh? At what point is my SL home and furniture and relationships and business no longer binary data? At the point when it either moves the emotions? At the point the money cashes out into a bank account? A lot of what millions of people spending their days behind computers are doing is virtual. Do you think that when the U.S. Congress passes a law, or the UN Security Council passes a resolution, they actually force people to do something differently? Once you pick it apart, so much of RL is virtual; once you accept its limitations and suspend disbelief, so much of the virtual is real.
And Shirky has a snark for CopyBot too -- CopyBot is something the snarkiest of tekkies gloat over and woot over because it fulfills their copyleft political ambitions:
Second Life is pushing against the ability to create zero-cost perfect copies, whereas Copybot relied on that most salient of digital capabilities, which is how Copybot was able to cause so much agida with so little effort — it was working with the actual, as opposed to metaphorical, substrate of Second Life.
Except...not? Yeah, everything you can see is copyable. But despite a staggering blow to the world (agida is not about FUD but about anger at callous and cynical tekkies deliberately griefing others) -- people kept on making, selling, buying and forming their little micro-relationships with micro-transactions in their little worlds. CopyBot couldn't copy *everything*. To be sure, the Lindens responded to a powerful social movement of creators and land owners and put in a strict prohibition of the "unauthorized" use of CopyBot -- and that's just it. You don't download on Napster anymore. And sooner or later, somebody has to pay.
Clay, not being in Second Life, scoffs at the idea of SL, asking if American Apparel made any money yet (I'll bet it didn't) or that Anshe is anything other than a fluke (a hard-working fluke with thousands of customers, then) -- and he fails to realize what should be one of his pet theories at work. The Long Tail has kids on the Teen Grid making $50 a month designing armour and swords; it has pensioners and part-time Walmart clerks and stay-at-home moms making $100 US a month to pay for all their utility bills. It seems appropriate that just as the average U.S. family has to absorb a huge new cost for the use of new media, it has found a way to offset the cost by monetarizing their time on line even in relatively small amounts.
We don't have to be with Snowcrash and Keanu Reeves just yet. What we have, as crashy, clunky, and politically stupid as we have now, is just so much better than radio, television, magazines, or novels, that we won't be looking back. It's good enough. And the sale of media ad space ought to tell the geeks this; and the transformation of life to online transactions for everything from banking to health care should tell them this. We're online a good deal of the time -- and by we, I don't have to mean a billion on the planet, because it will be enough if the major urban centers with both intellectuals and educated workers able at least to operate computers are plugged in to have an extraordinary effect.
Regardless of how you count the numbers -- and I'm a big a critic as any of the vaporous "millions" who don't exist at all -- there are lots and lots of people in SL -- and the kind of people the Lindens didn't ask to come, and don't even especially like -- non-geeks, and people with wildly different values and perceptions contrasting with theirs.
The geeks of Web. 1.0 once shook their heads that their bosses and leaders didn't use email; today we who use email, too, shake our heads that they don't get the value of a 3-D life online. But fortunately, increasingly, we'll be making do without them and their purchasing decisions and their gate-keeping and barrier functions. Thank God, there are no more webmasters; everybody can be a webmaster.
Between the geeks within the virtual world in the way of progress (they keep trying to develop and deploy clunky shiny new features like "HTML on a prim" or "Havoc 2" which simply aren't important to most users, instead of stabilizing the world for its increased use) and the geeks outside the world (busy chortling if not sneering at breathless press coverage about people they imagine as one-hand-typing blingtards), we do have some significant challenges.
But take heart, everybody is going to get to be a geek in Second Life!
Prokofy,
I can't help but feel that your critcisms of the "tekkie" type are akin to a straw-man argument. You come forth and say "there are people that are bad -- they are tekkies". Then, you say "tekkies are all bad people". You haven't really said anything here, other than telling us that you don't like people that you don't like.
Fair enough. In the interest of having a constructive discussion -- are all tekkies bad? Is it somehow inevitable that once someone reaches a level of knowledge or involvement in the technical realm, that they lose all touch with the rest of the world?
Put another way -- when you talk to a "tekkie", do you automatically assume they look down upon you? What would a tekkie type have to do to earn your respect?
Posted by: bushing Spatula | December 13, 2006 at 06:27 AM
oh, I'd start with your discredited and disreputable group, bushing Spatula, and kick out not only the new v-5/w-hat alts but also have the people found making, selling, and griefing with copybot and other "products" to step down, out, away, gonzo -- not without some different title in the group.
That would only be for starters?
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 13, 2006 at 07:05 AM
Second Life is considerably harder than HTML, and most people still don't have their own web-pages.
Furthermore, according to Google Analytics 99.9400086% of all online shopping without any form of flash or 3D. Those are an impediment to shopping, not an aid.
You don't know about LambdaMOO, you don't know about VRML. That's fine. Not learning from history is a great way to go about repeating it. I don't think i've run across (if only it were "run over"!) anyone quite so proud of their own pig-ignorance before.
Posted by: Cael | December 13, 2006 at 08:35 AM
As a GEEK who has a high interest in MOO and understands its failure, I'm most certainly not one of the people stuck harping on the 'mistakes of the past.' Sure, VRML and MOO were impossible to catch on. It's rather expected, they're not terribly easy to use or implement. The average user playin a MOO will get sick pretty quick. The subset of people who find enjoyment in text-based games is (unfortunately) quite small, the immersion factor is nil for them. In VRML's case (I think, from what I know) the difficulty is in the creation process and feeling of freedom. Here, indeed, only a technically sophisticated person can truly express themselves.
But as new things come along, one can't help but see the new possibilities opened for even larger amounts of people. Long before WoW came around, I played Ultima Online. That's 1997; I joined in 1998-ish. Besides being a fun MMORPG experience (none of its successors have met my expectations as derived from UO), it was quite an immersive world. While limited, you had a quite customizable avatar, in a world where it was so very easy to express yourself as such. It was also notably without levels or quests at the time. Without as much of a treadmill, even 'powergamers' still mixed effectively with the rest of the lot. The possibilities of the player economy were massive. You could own houses, make vendors, sell out of your pack; these could be things you crafted yourself, found, whatever. It's amazing how long it took future games to start catching on to some successful aspects of UO, and most still haven't captured all of them. Supposedly, it was the FIRST MMORPG to break the 100,000 user subscription mark, outstanding for its era.
I think what is happening with each new environment that's emerging is we're seeing the threshold of difficulty to express oneself and immerse into the environment lowered by leaps and bounds. SL happens to have a threshold low enough that it's really catching like wildfire. With all the opportunity within SL, and the possibilities that will be opened in the future by even more sophisticated worlds that follow in its footsteps, indeed, people like Shirky should open their eyes. But that doesn't mean all of us geeks are blind.
Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 13, 2006 at 10:13 AM
In 1996 probably the only people in my town with significant internet access were in the university.
In 2006 probably half the houses on my street have broadband. It's one thing to say you have to learn from the past, but there's such a thing as critical mass, and now we have myspace and blogs making it even easier for people to be social and/or express themselves through a virtual place they call "theirs". No HTML required.
Maybe SL isn't the next great thing, and it is horrible to get started in- but besides that it's not too difficult to get a 16x32 virtual plot of land, put a prefab cabin on it and call it yours. I speak to people in SL all the time who aren't technical or internet geeks. Some of them likely never did more than book a holiday online before or email family. They're not dumb, they're just not geeks, and that much is clear. But they are in SL now, today. Ok not *now* today, as it's down for patching.
In 1996 *everyone* on the internet was a geek. I think the Chief Geeks who have all the answers and theories about it forget that they've been swimming in internet geekery for decades in their academic or technology speheres. Middle aged couples on your street are figuring it out too, and the computer they got from PC World last year runs SL. That's the difference ten years makes.
It only takes enough people to find something compelling for it to stick. It doesn't have to be more useful than the alternatives. The kind of people immersing (or augmenting) themselves in SL now are not the people who gave up on MOO 10 years ago. Those are the bitter ones sniping that if they want to waste evenings chatting they have IRC for that.
Posted by: Ace Albion | December 13, 2006 at 10:56 AM
What a strange culture gap we have here.
By and large, Prokofy, I think your read is wrong.
Not all tech-savvy people cut from the same cloth. In this essay you conflate several different points of view and lump them all together under "tekkie."
Copyleft is a separate issue from atomicity, which is a separate issue from property, which is a separate issue from community, which is a separate issue from hype. And it is possible to have nuanced opinions about each of these issues individually.
Frankly, many of your comments sound... well, parochial. They are so absolutely centered in just one way of doing things, when there is not yet One True Way for online worlds. I don't mean that as a slam; I'm just trying to point out that you seem to be implying that you & others "get it" while those who have been working hard in this field for years to decades and who are trying to point out some of the pitfalls "don't get it." Frankly, that's silly and shortsighted. Everything you have said about emotional connection, frontiers, bringing in the common people -- every word of it is something that I, and others have said already. We're ON YOUR SIDE on this, but also have been around long enough to be able to point out some of the realities.
I hope you and those like you CAN walk around those pitfalls like they weren't there. But I guarantee that five years from now, you'll look back and say "damn -- look at those huge pitfalls -- we didn't even notice, but it's a good thing we walked left in the darkness right then."
Posted by: Raph | December 13, 2006 at 11:34 AM
SL is considerably harder than HTML?
Well, I know how to do SL, but I don't know how to do HTML.
Maybe part of it is motivation. I had a pretty good reason to learn SL, because I could create anything I wanted to with it.
HTML? As far as I know, I could create a web page with that. I'm not interested in that.
I think a lot of people are more interested in being able to create anything they want - houses, hats, pets, avatars, you name it - than being able to create a web page.
The creation of the web page itself - the HTML, etc. - is not the most creative part anyway. It's what you put ON it that is creative, and I don't believe I need to know HTML in order to put things on a web page that someone else has already created for me anyway.
Similarly, we don't need to learn how to create SL or something similar itself. We may not be interested in creating platforms or games, but we are interested in creating houses, hats, and avatars, and selling them.
Kinda like - I may not want to build television sets, and improve on television sets, but I may well want to be the talent on a television show.
I think it is a truism that, where all things computer is concerned, people WILL struggle to learn that which they have some reason to learn, and will ignore the multitudes of other things, also a bother to learn, which they don't want or need.
(This is true of all technology, by the way - including remote controls, VCR's, digital cameras - you name it; we learn what we want to learn, and ignore the rest.)
One thing I have noticed in my long years on the computer is the general unwillingness of coding types to share their knowledge.
When I first got my computer, I was crazed that no online things really explained things clearly. OK, I thought, these people simply aren't writers, and aren't interested in writing that teaches how to use these products.
Over time, though, I decided these people were actually unusually proprietary about their knowledge, and I toyed various times with the idea of writing truly clear explanations for things.
Since then, though, I've decided they really don't WANT people to understand how to do what they do, or even how to use what they have created.
SL itself is a case in point. It's almost stubborn how you can't find out how to work anything.
With coders, I think it's that way because people are guarding their livelihoods, trying to make themselves irreplacable.
But even with all that, people WILL struggle to learn that for which they see a big payoff, and that means they will learn what they need to - despite the lack of clear instructions, and despite the constantly increasing and changing bugs that presumably aren't important enough to fix - while remaining totally unmotivated to learn HTML.
As Tyken said, it may be harder than some other things, but the threshold is low enough - and, I would add, the motivation high enough - to make it do-able by thousands who want to express their creativity this way, and to profit from it.
Geekiness is a relative term anyhow, by the way. People pride themselves on being geeks, i.e., being computer programmers and the like, enjoying varying degrees of geekiness within confined and specialized hothouse environments like SL.
But to the rest of the world, I'M a geek. (Computer lingo-wise, not circus-wise.) I'm the computer "go-to" person for bunches of people! Imagine that.
And the same is true of Prok's Wal-Mart clerk example. Clerk by day, "go-to" computer person by night, making money selling fashions on SL, and helping her Wal-Mart co-workers with their computer problems.
The singular, and monumental draw SL enjoys over all other things out there is the ability to make content and to profit from it. This is truly unique in the online world, in that SL has done it better than any other place so far.
Good piece, Prok.
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut | December 13, 2006 at 11:57 AM
Priding ourselves on geekness seems, I suppose, as silly as people priding themselves on being "stupid about math" or "useless with those newfangled technical gadgets." Some of us are simply jaded from users incessently chanting "I don't care how it works, just tell me which button to press and, tomorrow, when I need to do it again for a slightly different purpose, I'll call you again and again and again and again."
You don't need tekkies in SL because you can build your own objects and texture them and script them yourself. Thank Heaven for the liberation. No wait, is the point that users don't need tekkies or that tekkies notoriously don't share howto information? Now I'm confused.
Well hopefully PL isn't a bubble and is ultimately scalable and is becoming the free-for-all-users Metaverse. It'll likely be an entitlement for every US citizen to afford the equipment to connect to The Grid All Hail The Central Grid before the decade is complete.
I remember when URU online's original beta shut down. We were aghast that a place we had inhabited and invested so much time working to improve had just ceased to exist in a day. We were frantically posting "they can't do this, it's not right, it's not legal, they just can't." But they did. The same sort of thing happens when a popular TV series finally airs the final segment and that virtual world is closed. Except that fans continue to write stories, roleplay, host conventions and do a hundred other things to expand the universe and keep it alive. Are we yet branching out of the grid so that our second lives consist of more than just living on the shaky grid?
If a closed culture of dedicated livlihood really *has* developed in PL, I feel deeply emotionally worried for the people who are rooted in it. If they don't know how it works, they can't know how tenuous the system really is. Even hours of unplanned downtime and increasing numbers of critical errors don't seem to register. But then people don't evacuate hurricane and volcano zones either, sometimes even when they *do* truly understand the danger.
So we should just continue playing house and having sex and building and scripting and shopping and not caring a wit how it all works or whether it'll continue working tomorrow. I ain't no tekkie gawsh can't neither be pressin no buttons y'all cause in touch with my feminine side and Black Power too.
Posted by: Khamon | December 13, 2006 at 12:50 PM
On a positive note, it's good to see Prokofy and Jarod agree on something.
http://jarodrussell.livejournal.com/
Posted by: Khamon | December 13, 2006 at 12:53 PM
Well, yes, I'm going to keep on doing what I do in SL as long as it's fun, even though I know the whole thing could go poof any minute.
I think most people realize it's tenuous.
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut | December 13, 2006 at 01:53 PM
One of my friends who's a writer and public speaker recently joined SL. She's smart, and a competent computer user. Helping her learn the interface was an adventure. A lot of the newbie experience assumes an engineering mindset; people are expected to just start pushing buttons, picking options, and go explore. The new help material I've seen is far better, but SL's Knowledge Base still feels a lot like using Microsoft's Knowledge Base.
Barrier to entry. Learning curve. Ease of use. Interfaces designed "by engineer."
The worst of the techies that piss you off so much are what my crowd mockingly call 133t Hax0rs. Predatory self-esteem is probably their most noticable trait.
There's techies who are just clueless, most of them can be retrained if they spend enough time outside their usual crowds. They've fallen into the habit of assuming the people they hang out with are "normal" and tend to not understand the difference between ignorance (not having certain information) and not having an engineering mindset. They'll earnestly explain the pros and cons of various network protocols when all their grandma wants to know is whether she'll be able to see her email.
I put bread on the table by wrangling software. I drool at a lot of the toys on ThinkGeek.com. I've also spent time helping newbies. (No intention on my part, but they keep finding me.) I've watched more than one of them go from "I can't script" to realizing they can put hovertext on a prim, or make it spin, or add bling to something. I want to see what they create, when they aren't limited by all the things they can't do. That's why I made and give away those Sound Prims. I think everything they do should have been available from a tab in the editor. I currently can't change the editor, but I like knowing that the retired elementary school teacher I met in SL can make her own doorbell.
Posted by: Storm Thunders | December 13, 2006 at 01:56 PM
For techies called "one trick ponies" that kind of change is frightening. For the rest it is exciting. There's always new tech, ideas and abstractions, languages, tools... it is a great career choice if you love learning. There's others (journalism and teaching come to mind) but in the US tech pays better.
Posted by: Storm Thunders | December 13, 2006 at 02:22 PM
Too long, didn't read.
Posted by: INTERNET | December 13, 2006 at 03:13 PM
Geek war! Except one side is the Non-Geek Geeks.
Crazy geeks.
Posted by: Michael Chui | December 13, 2006 at 03:28 PM
Prok,
Nice ad hominem. Pretend you don't have a grudge against me (or the people I associate with, or whatever), and please answer the question in the hypothetical. Again, I'm trying to be constructive here.
When you talk to a "tekkie", do you automatically assume they look down upon you? What would a tekkie type have to do to earn your respect?
Posted by: bushing Spatula | December 13, 2006 at 06:33 PM
"Everyone will be having a Second Life, as easily as they have a second car, job, house, wife, chance."
Could you defend this statement?
Today we aren't even close to the point where everyone has a web-site or profile page.
Dismissing those who have encountered these problems before is shortsighted. There are things that we've learned about online human interaction that are *independent of techonological concerns.* There are still so many problems to solve that ignoring history just compounds your chances of failure.
Posted by: F. Randall Farmer | December 13, 2006 at 07:36 PM
I think it's been made fairly clear by now that one of the leading factors in the gradually increasing success in online worlds is due to how much easier it's becoming to take part in them. Sure, not EVERYONE is making an avatar, getting a blog, or making their own online shopping business. However, the number of people who are doing so relative to the number of people using the internet as a whole is increasing fairly rapidly. Compared to 10 years ago, it's ridiculously easy for someone to set up their own personal website. I can click a few places and sign my name to have any number of blogs available to me. So in response, you could at least bother to outline what these things *independent of technological concerns* are, in your mind. Tell us some of the problems, instead of just saying they exist and not explaining why.
Posted by: Tyken Hightower | December 13, 2006 at 08:11 PM
As it's not my software nor my company, I don't "compound my changes of failure" -- Linden Lab does. I'm merely a customer, and while I'd aspire to have more equal treatment as a respected partner and more democracy, I don't take on all the sins of LL.
Your comment just seems pointless to me, I'm sorry. Everybody *can* have a web page, usually for free. This doesn't mean "everybody in the world even the poor suffering people in Africa". No need to get literal and preachy about it. But everyone who is in a reasonably developed urban educated center. If my colleagues from Africa or Central Asia have email and webpages, and my little cousin in Ohio has a web page, well, lots of people have web pages. If they don't have them, then they have access to one. No need to overstate this, but here's what my statement means: that it is easy for those who decide they want access to it.
I could spend $40 on a cable bill; or spend $40 on Second Life and a 8192 m2 of land on their server.
And, note I said SECOND. Second job -- that's quite a bit, landing and doing. Second wife -- what, the first one wasn't good enough? Was that second one THAT easy to find? Second home -- you mean you are rich enough to pay two mortgages? See, I said, LIKE having the other things in life that are "seconds" so that it is clear: this is the affluent in a middle class kind of way. You CAN have a second home -- if you decide that is what you want.
A lot -- a lot! -- of people have DSL lines or broadband now. That was the biggest hurdle. That means on a lot of new-generation computers, the graphic cards they need are already installed. They log in from all over. It's not ubiquitous; it is not electricity. But it is there, to be had, easily enough.
Why is that so hard to understand, and why would you need to browbeat it?
I was turned away and turned off by Second Life the first time I came in 2003. In 2004, I almost left. It's not easy, starting out. But it has gotten better since then in terms of accessibility. I think it's a pretty reasonable statement now that if I have a computer at home or the office with broadband, I can do this.
What's so hard about it? are you artificially hyping imagined hypothetical scenarios just to be contrary?
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 13, 2006 at 08:14 PM
Tyken has summed it up very well. It is ridiculously easy to start a web page or a blog now with far less clicks than 5 years ago. What's annoying is that starting forums has gotten so much harder due to all the spam and anti-spam ware and menus to toggle. I wish I could find a good free forums software -- PHPB or whatsis is a horror.
One of the classic ways that geeks try to emotionally blackmail you into accepting their position is through invoking the poor, the unconnected, the unwashed waiting for um...THEIR intervention and management. I've run across this now so many times as to declare it a syndrome. Geeks, who are supposed to be rational, and high tech, are some of the most emotionally manipulative and infantile types out there. It comes with the hypertrophied development of one side of their aspect, I guess, that they then use wierd logic like "None of the people in Africa have this so you can't". Gosh, if you waited around to catch up Africa to every technological advance, you'd never get anything done. AND Africas in fact get the technology and adapt way more than you think -- and hey, without having to become dependent on Western do-good tekkies as they are more and more becoming educated and becoming their own networkers.
And those that try to say, oh, my brother and my grandmother don't have this are the same people that told us AOL was death for the Internet and AOL is a terrible model. It's as if they can't recognize the truth: HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE STILL ON AOL. This always amazes me. I walk into all kinds of homes and even offices and find people still on AOL. They are supposed to be elite, passe, hopelessly clueless. But...they like AOL -- mainly for the AIM, I guess.
I guess I just want the reality of the culture of ordinary people to intrude more on the consciousness of people who are immersed in geekdom.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 13, 2006 at 08:21 PM
Prokofy! ;0 Are you stoked or what?! They put automatic logging into the client under preferences! Now anyone can have word for word accurate logs of any conversation they have in SL without having to save them out by hand..
This will save you a lot of time I'm sure.. No more worries about crashing before you copy and paste the logs! No more missing important conversational cues while saving the log.
It's truly the dawning of a new age in Second Life! The age of accuracy in reporting! REJOICE!
Posted by: Baba | December 13, 2006 at 09:27 PM
A counter argument or why I'm glad the "geeks" won't go.
http://www.allanadion.com/?p=52
Posted by: Allana Dion | December 13, 2006 at 11:59 PM
Way to stereotype, man. People like you do just as much damage to the way geeks and non-geeks interact as those you decry.
I'm a "tekkie", who is buildin a project in Second Life precisely because of its accessibility to non-geeks. Most of my friends aren't geeks, and I don't look down on them for it any more than they look down on me for my artistic lacks. It takes all types.
Posted by: Nathaniel Eliot | December 14, 2006 at 05:07 AM
It's not a stereotype, it's identification of a deep pattern, and critique of it. The pattern is there to be seen. And Clay Shirky and fans are stereotyping the rest of us non-tekies explicitly. The idea that people who criticize put-downs of SL on the grounds that it is not MMORPG-y or geeky *enough* are somehow "harming relations" is one of those geek fallacies of control. Let it go.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | December 14, 2006 at 05:51 AM
I'm not stereotyping anyone on those grounds, Prok. Sure, i'm a geek. I've spent the last month or so developing HLSL shaders and procedural animation techniques. When you know what those are, you might begin to see why i think SL is a bad joke....
I honestly don't care about the skills. If someone develops a tool that means you can do everything that i can do or more, that's great. I'll probably use it, too, because i'm lazy that way.
But i mean, seriously, you are coming across in a deeply kindergarten whine kind of way here.
"OH NOEZ, bigger boys keep laughing at my sandcastle!" So what? Why should it be a problem? If you like your sandcastle, that's great. But if i build skyscrapers and dams for a living, then i have the right to comment on anyone charging for sandcastles among my peers, and bitching about it is not going to make me stop.
In this one instance, i think the best thing you can do is stop reading. You seem to be proud of not understanding what you read anyway, so why bother?
You could do something you like better instead. I'm certain that SL-Escorts.com has some suggestions.
Posted by: Cael | December 14, 2006 at 11:35 AM
After everything I've read from you today, I can't believe you describe Shirky's piece as "petulant"! Meow!
Posted by: blackbelt_jones | December 17, 2006 at 07:22 PM