Earlier this month
Olando7 Decosta/Roland LeGrand of Mixed Realities, a European Resident, wrote a couple of posts with at least four fascinating takeaways, each very different but still dovetailing together. It's worth following them in four discrete parts:
- For Metanomics, Decosta writes an article arguing that a classic Western description of Second Life's economy, merely as rationally self-interested players seeking to maximize profit, was flawed. Instead, he argues, it was better to think in terms of a gift economy, such as the Native American potlatch. In doing so, he cites French theoreticians Baudrillard and Bataille, who describe the Potlatch ceremony as a way of achieving social dominance by competing to give away more.
- In response to that view, Decosta winds up talking in backchat with another Resident, Nany Kayo, during a live in-world Metanomics. As it turns out, Ms. Kayo is a Cherokee woman who's attended an actual Potlatch ceremoy, describing it to him as "a beautiful ritual, about which a lot more is to say than the competition aspect mentioned by these European authors."
- That interaction causes him to marvel at the global and culture-spanning power of the SL experience: "So here I was, in Belgium, talking to a Cherokee citizen, sharing her experience and knowledge about those important ceremonies." This in turn inspires him to analyze the unique power of Second Life's chat channel, as well:
- "Both avatars engaged in a conversation in a chat channel, like we could have done, technically speaking, on MSN Messenger or Skype," he acknowledges. "However, the chat channel exists because there is a virtual world, which made possible something like the Metanomics show and community."
Read it all here and here. To Mr. Decosta's four points, I add a fifth: in my experience, multi-faceted interactions like this happen all the time. This happens because you are experiencing the world of Second Life as a 3D immersive space (which includes elements that are unique to SL, and those which are somehow related to the real world), while conversing with other Residents in IM/Chat/Voice. Consequently, you often wind up with several channels of information streaming together at once, often influencing each other. So while it's a unique and extraordinary thing for a Belgian to chat with a Cherokee over the meaning of Potlatch as it relates to the metaverse economy as it in turn relates to classical economic theory, equally unique interactions like this occur everyday in Second Life.
Image credit: Orland7's Flickr stream.
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