Life 2.0, Jason Spingarn-Koff's well-reviewed documentary about Second Life, is making its cable TV debut in the US this week, on Oprah Winfrey's network OWN, which picked up the movie last year. If you have OWN, set your alarm for Thursday, August 25th at 9/8c. Here's its Oprah-fied trailer:
More on the OWN page for the movie here, including a very interesting viewer discussion thread. A number of hardcore SLers have complained that the movie dwells too much on the more sordid or controversial aspects of Second Life (real marriages broken up by virtual sex, age and gender play, and so on), but I think that somewhat misses the point of Jason's movie: These are very true, very substantial parts of the SL experience, and for that matter, express deeper longings that are an essential part of life online. These deserve just as much consideration as the positive applications of SL, especially since those -- for instance, art, education, therapy, research, architecture, and so on -- are not necessarily how SL is primarily used. I tried to cover both sides of the SL story in my own book, but as Jason told me, his goal was to tell the stories he found in SL, not tell the story of SL. At any rate, I absolutely recommend watching it, it's powerful, provactive filmmaking.
I interviewed Jason about the movie a couple years ago at SXSW (albeit with a major hangover), which you can also watch below:
Hate when this happens :o(
"The uploader has not made this video available in your country."
Guess I will never get to see the Documentary, since I doubt that it will ever come to Portugal *sigh*
Posted by: Winter | Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 03:58 AM