20 January 2007
Second Life: the new frontier of e-campaigning?
The virtual parallel universe baffles Nick Martlew, but could it be an opportunity for Oxfam?
Second Life is weird, weird, WEIRD. Weird in so many ways. It’s weird.
A brief introduction is needed before I explore my thesis – that Second Life is weird. Second Life is one of a small number of user-created, real-time virtual universes (‘Metaverses’). Second Life is economically and geographically bigger than Monaco. At about this point I go cross-eyed. Users (‘residents’) create virtual identities (‘avatars’) and do all the things that dreams were made for.
The avatars are human – roughly – but any avatar needn’t necessarily correspond to the frustrated, slightly pallid person at the other end of the mouse. You can have wings.
So Second Life is weird and unique in that its natives are from another reality. What until now I considered to be the real world sends explorers into Second Life: Newsnight and Reuters have sent correspondents into the virtual world. The explorers then colonise: Radio 1 holds concerts in Second Life, US Congressmen hold press conferences in Second Life - is that not a little weird?
And what’s weirdest about Second Life is how similar it is to the real world. There is money to be made (a US dollar is worth about 300 Linden Dollars, if you’re interested!), making virtual identities into real-world millionaires. There is property – real estate prices rose by 24% in December; and intellectual property is protected by some ethereal Leviathan. There is even a progressive tax system on land ownership.
Does this interaction between real and, well, less real present an opportunity for campaigning organisations like Oxfam? Reebok has a store in Second Life with imagined people selling imagined trainers. Other companies and organisations send out avatars into Second Life to survey (and shape) customer views – whether real or not I can’t even contemplate. So why couldn’t Oxfam get involved?
I’m not talking about kitting out an avatar with a clipboard to pester winged identities that can, after all, just fly off. But there are ‘sweatshops’ of people paid a pittance to build up other people’s avatars – should the Make Trade Fair campaign get involved?
And if Oxfam had a powerful voice in Second Life - campaigning for relations to be on the basis of justice and equality - might those values permeate into the real world? After all, didn’t Neo save the real world through the Matrix? But that wasn’t real either, was it… I think I need to go sit in a dark room for a while.
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Nick Martlew was born in Malaysia. This is his interesting fact. A graduate of Oxford and Sheffield, Nick then sold his soul to Oxfam for the price of lunch and travel. As a campaigns volunteer in Leeds he took part in the Change programme and he is now an intern, researching Oxfam's humanitarian protection work.
Ideally, Nick would like to be paid, perhaps even in a job he enjoys, like in advocacy or speech-writing.
Until then, he is editor of 
