Hope versus Understanding: the Yankee Group and the Rimm Effect

So the Yankee Group has withdrawn its "Wither Second Life" report which dubiously asserted a slowing growth rate since 2006 and twelve minutes average monthly usage.  Last Friday, report co-author Christopher Collins told Joey Seiler of VirtualWorldsNews.com they'll rewrite it, though they're not satisfied with the numbers Linden Lab's are giving them now, saying, "Even based on Linden's own analysis, there are usages that range from an hour a month to 40 hours a month..." 

There's something odd about that statement: last week when I e-mailed the Yankee Group authors, asking about the methodology of their original report, Christopher Collins told me, "All of my stats came from my analysis of published Linden Lab data." So if he's not satisfied with Linden's numbers now, why did he claim to entirely rely on them, beforehand?  And what unknown Linden data points was he referring to in the first place?  Since the report's being re-jiggered, I suppose these will be among the many mysteries remanded to shadow.

What isn't a mystery, however, is how pervasive the original report has already become:  last week, the 12 minutes average/slowdown since 2006 figures were cited without even a tincture of skepticism by Wired.com, by Valleywag (of course), by MIT's Adverlab, by Marketing Vox, by David Kushner of IEEE's blog, by stock analyst The Motley Fool, among many, many others.  This is the phenomenon that interests me more, because these are influential sites with a lot of credibility in their respective circles.  Yet somehow, all of them unquestioningly repeated data that an active SL user would instantly consider strange, were they to look at them closely (for reasons explained here.)

Why?  This is what I'm calling the Rimm Effect.  And to explain what that means, we need to go back about 13 years.

The early 90s saw the first wave of general interest around this obscure, academic/government system called the Internet.  E-mail addresses were gradually becoming commonplace, activity on Usenet groups and dial-up bulletin board systems grew, while some college kid in Chicago was creating something called a "web browser" that was supposed to be the killer app of this hard-to-use medium.  Many people started saying this whole Internet thing was the future. 

Many more, however, did not.  To them, the idea of devoting so much time and resources on a worldwide network of computers seemed threatening, or at least annoying.  And their main condemnation will sound familiar to readers of this Second Life blog: the Internet, they announced, while somewhat interesting as a brief fad, was ultimately for anti-social freaks with no real lives who only went online for virtual sex.  And as interest in the Net persisted, so did the intensity of this litany.

And then another college kid named Martin Rimm appeared on the scene.  What followed next is partly summarized from a chronology by Brock Meeks, available on the EFF's site:

In 1994, Rimm prepares a study purporting to prove that 83.5 percent of images traded on Usenet are pornographic.  He begins shopping it to the media.  Time Magazine picks it up, and uses the Rimm report as an anchor for a cover story featuring a terrified child staring into the Internet.  Given the magazine's imprimatur, the report's findings are echoed across the media.  Most of them credulously, unquestioningly repeat a figure that the average Internet user back then would instantly consider strange.  But that doesn't matter, because the stories are not written for them, or by them.  And soon enough, a Senator is waving the copy of Time Magazine, and repeating that 83.5 percent number into the Congressional Record, as part of his call to censor the Internet.

Let us (especially the Yankee Group's lawyers) be clear:  I am not comparing the Rimm report to the "Wither Second Life" report.  The comparison is to what followed, after each was published:  immediate acceptance and promulgation of an inflammatory claim which comes with no ready methodology, which impugns an entire medium in consequence if not in intent, and which on its face is highly questionable to anyone with substantial experience in the phenomenon it's purporting to describe.

Another comparison comes from motive: in both instances, it's driven at least in part by a desire to dismiss, and a rationale to do so.  In an eloquent and thundering jeremiad, Gwyneth Llewelyn ascribes this to a conspiracy of powerful experts and executives desperate to discredit this thing that's threatening their reputation and industries.  I think there's a simpler explanation, because it comes down to hope versus understanding. 

As SL persists, and more competitors (including Google) announce plans to create a better Second Life, the Rimm Effect will grow. Put-upon people who can't bear spending another moment of their lives having to think about immersive avatars or dynamic content creation or any of that will continue fumbling about for the magic bullet that'll finally kill the whole thing.  This is their hope.

Then there's understanding.  This comes from people who take the time to personally explore Second Life thoroughly enough to grasp its best potential.  (As I've written before, the strongest detractors rarely bother to do this.)  Given Second Life's myriad frustrations, many will reasonably come away believing that the idea has promise, but just awaits a better execution.  They may very well be right.  After all, sometimes they'll be named Raph Koster.  Others will bounce off the system for awhile, before punching through, like veteran game developer Scott Jennings, into brilliant enlightenment.  At a certain point, the ratio of influential people with understanding will eclipse those still hoping it'll go away, and then the debate will change.

As for the Rimm?  Some of the Internet's earliest advocates rallied quickly, and step by step, with painstaking research and collaboration, undermined his study at its roots.  (Again, the EFF has their story.)  Despite their heroic efforts, however, the 83.5 canard kept getting repeated for a few years longer, but by then, there were too many people with too much personal experience with the Internet to take it seriously.  And by the force of their direct understanding, Rimm's report was eventually forgotten. 

What do you suppose the shelf life of 12 minutes will be?

First image of a future Second Life by Torley Linden.

Comments

[pavig lok]

This 12 minutes thing is going to last a lot longer than we might hope. There are a lot of folks with a vested interest in hanging onto this damning figure. This does not just include direct competitors.

Not least of these is the Yankee Group themselves, to which the future success of rich virtual worlds which by their nature don't scale to mobile technology, are a direct threat to companies that subscribe to the main thread of their consultancy. They sell their "anywhere technology" message in an open market. As a consultancy playing down platforms that compete for attention with those of their clients, but don't conform to the model they're selling, is highly advantageous. There are plenty of other consultancies in the market which would be happy to help you develop a strategy for business in SL in direct competition for the same market space. For the Yankee Group to get your business though, they'd have to go against much of what they say they're "about" on their website. Clearly there's a conflict of interest here in them slamming SL as a platform.

Now that we've done the "SL is full of yiffing furries and ageplayers" in the mainstream media, and journalists are starting to need to do real research to come up with a story for a better informed public, it's time for the conservative business media to have a go at easy journalism. Massive failure to engage a public is porn for the business press. It's very easy to slap together some mashup editorial based around something like the 12 minutes number, as the metrics for time of engagement of traditional media are now institutionalized and available to any journalist - in fact they can probably reel them off the top of their heads. Those 12 minutes are the kind of thing a journo would doubletake on - "what only 12 LOL" - and run with.

Expect to see a long life for gonzo journalism parading that figure.

Unfortunately Yankee Group have withdrawn their report so we can't see what other things they surmised in their loaded title article. I have a feeling that under proper scrutiny the rest of their argument would be found similarly unbalanced.

As for the main theme of their article, I've had no problem accessing SL via ajaxlife from a mobile device while out having coffee. It's not nearly as fun, nor should it be. We've got facebook and blogs and other far more lightweight things to do on our tiny screens. The market is large enough to support all these rich media, so why complain that SL is going nowhere cause you can't avchat on your tiny phone screen?

Oh well.

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Excellent work with this NWN entry. Been there in '94, heard exactly the same ill-willed and unfounded critiques.

Even if the LL metaverse does not become the standard, one of them will. Why can't folks who have seen the emergence of the Web recognize that? Is it that virtual worlds still look too "gamish" to them?

My academic colleagues (who should have known better) in the mid-90s were completely dismissive of the Web, except for a few early adopters. Now many of them chime in with "what's the educational value of SL?"

Exact same Q from 13-14 years ago. Now we use the Web seamlessly for everything from posting course content to submitting grades to checking our payroll stubs.

[csven]

As I was seeing the exact same thing (most recently on Blue's News yesterday), I'm glad you've raised this issue. As pavig suggests, there certainly seemed to me to be a need on the part of the Yankee Group to find some justification for what sounds like a predetermined conclusion.

[Poianone]

Also, Yankee Group and Rimm effect stories remind me the (in)famous case of Fredric Wertham's "Seduction of the Innocent" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent), a book published in 1954. The author, a professor of psychology, sustained the thesis comic books were a bad form of popular literature and a serious cause of juvenile delinquency. Therefore, it created alarm in parents and galvanized them to campaign for censorship, which translated into a wich hunt promoted by US government. Moreover, I think that history can witness many similar cases, and not just about media and technology...
On the other side, I believe it's worth to note a fine distinction between Wertham and Rimm publications, form one side, and Yankee group study, from the other: while the former where academics studies, the latter came from a private society, which has it's core business in providing accurate metrics and statistics. Why, I ask to myself, a society announced a report based on so coarse data? They said they used Linden Lab data, but that's not possible, as those statistics depict a totally different picture of the story. Does Yankee Group run by inexperienced, superficial workers? Hard to believe, to me, as long as anyone would not pay for rough inaccuracies. So, I find Gwyneth version may be not too distant from truth...

[Crissa]

Media Revolution video...

I rather liked how this video went ^-^

We even have voice in Second Life on-time...

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

EC Comics...the creepy puppets on Howdy Doody...Led Zep played backward...Pac Man's subliminal sexual message...the Web's vast bin of free porn...Second Life.

The flower of our youth is endangered. We must act now to save them...

Thanks to Poianone for mentioning the Wertham book.