Location: Time Magazine’s Web Site
It would be laughable were it not so sad, that Time declared Second Life one of the five worst Web sites out there.

I smell a scared and uniformed reaction to something the major media outlets do not get at all, and never will: virtual worlds. 

I will thank, and not just out of self-interest, Media General and the Richmond Times Dispatch for letting me run this blog without interference.  In that gesture I see them hedging their own bets and re-inventing themselves, while Time opts out and hobbles into the 21st Century with creaking joints.

Time‘s cheap shot at SL does have one canny point: the navigation in-world is clumsy.  Every other critique, however, completely misses the mark and shows how little time Time was willing to invest in seeing SL’s vast world. 

One point really does show the gray in the hair of Time’s writers: the learning curve for SL is “too steep.“  Frankly, my students got used to SL’s interface rapidly, where most non-gamers I know over 40 are flummoxed by even learning how to walk properly in SL.  Another ridiculous gripe is that creating one’s avatar is “tedious.“  For the dull-witted or passive consumer of images, I suppose making avatars is a pain.

Cecil Hirvi and I have been communicating by e-mail a bit about the future of text.  I disagree that it’s dying, but the old ways of getting it are in trouble. Thus it’s easy to take cheap shots when you don’t understand a few basic points taken for granted by anyone under 40 and even by this bald-headed, middle-aged geek:

—SL might fail, but other virtual worlds exist.  No one yet offers SL’s best feature: resident-created content without too many restrictions.  That will come to other worlds, I’m betting
—People are turning, by the millions, from passive media such as TV and movies to interactive media such as virtual worlds and games
—Reading is declining (this does not make me happy, either).

A student once told me, “we don’t want just to study film.  We want to make films.“  Today’s big boys of old media cannot figure out—perhaps even want—consumers to become what Mia Wombat, a member of the Creative Commons Community in SL, calls “Conducers.“  Conducers make and enjoy each others’ media.  Just ask a blogger.

Next, I’m going to focus my Eno-Quest dispatches on how powerful Creative-Commons content can be.

My cheap and parting shot: the Time article is awful to navigate—and impossible for placing a link from this site.  Talk about bad sites!

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Yeah TIME is for old fuddy-duddies anyway…ha! And as for SL navigation…anything takes a while to get used to. That’s why we get to laugh at newbies walking into things - we were all there once. I remember Iggy having a large learning curve w/the navigations too…hmmm… And now he flies w/the best of ‘em.

Ok, so I read that TIMES thing.  It “read” like the reporter had 3 months to do the article on SL and waited until 2 weeks before deadline to actually try SL.

I also thought the reporter should have wrote at the end, “Don’t try SL. Just go back and watch TV and read TIME you dumbasses! I need to put food on the table!“

-Cecil

P.S. The comment about “finding a nut around every corner…go live ur RL.“, just says to me that this person doesn’t     realize that in RL there IS a nut around every corner.

Howdy,

I have not yet read the Time article but I understand your point about the old media of print-based mags and newspapers feeling threatened by new interactive medias.  It is funny though, I have done more “reading” and “typing” in the past 5 years than I have in my entire life. This is due to the constant, modern activity of typing and reading emails, blogs and websites (most are still text heavy). But I don’t read many books anymore because they make me sleepy!  I don’t blame ‘text’ for that problem it’s just that I am conditioned to receive information via images and sound now. And a lot of info can be expressed in a few seconds of good image/sound media pieces. Text is a technology just like today’s medias. It was invented to provide information (creative or otherwise). The place of ‘text’ in society may be losing its importance as the main source of receiving information…but I do know the ‘personalizing’ of certain ideas and concepts can only be expressed in text format. What excites me is understanding the true power of text and utilizing that power even if it becomes marginalized in the future where learning through “interactive media” may become the norm.

But I am getting away from what I wanted to say which is: I don’t read TIME and don’t plan to in the near future. (except the website to check out the article)

I am now using voice chat in SL…cause I’m flat out tired of typing! My fingers hurt and I hate correcting my own spelling!! But I will type something in chat if I think it will do the most amount of damage!

-Cecil of Borg

P.S. When’s the conference?

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