Brainstorms Meetup

It is already a week ago, but I'll mention it here nevertheless. Since BlogWalk 5 in Umea, way up north in Sweden, where we met Howard Rheingold, I've been active in the Brainstorms community. Brainstorms is a group of a few hundred people from all kinds of different walks of life, loosely held together by Howard. Every now and then a number of them find themselves in the same place and meet up. That's how we ended up with a fun group in Haarlem. Howard and his wife Judy from the US, Ein and her partner Andy from the UK, Gerrit Visser, Adosh, Garsett from Belgium, and Sander and Sandra who were our hosts in their home town. A boat ride, a dinner and above all good conversations.

ltr: Sander, Sandra, Gerrit, Howard (more photos)

During one of those conversations Adosh pointed me to Demo, a "grammar" for understanding organisations as sets of commitments, agreements and transaction between people, by a group at Delft University. It builds on the speech-act theory of Jurgen Habermas (in turn building on Wittgenstein and Searle). As Elmine did her M Sc. on Habermas in relation to the type of communication possible in weblogs, this of course triggered my interest. I'll try and dig a bit deeper into it in the coming weeks.

Is Second Life Empty Or Do We Just Think It Is

In private conversations in the Brainstorms community we regularly comment on the emptiness of Second Life you usually experience when walking through that virtual world.
For a workshop today I tried to pinpoint where that feeling of emptiness comes from a bit better.

First the numbers. Linden Lab currently reports that SL is about 700 million square meters big.
With a number of 30-40 thousand concurrent users that translates to about 50 residents per square kilometer (at 35.000 concurrent users).

If you compare that to the population density on earth which is 48 ppl/sq. km. (UN 2004 data, just land mass taken into account) this means that the SL population density is about the same as Mexico, White Russia, or Ireland. It is actually denser populated than the US, all of South America, and South Africa.

On the real earth we know where the population centers are and where the vast empty spaces of sparsely populated areas are, like the US Mid-West or the Brazilian rainforest.
In SL however all areas are built up, there are no rainforests, no Great Plains, no mountain ranges.

And we associate built up areas with population centers.
So when we end-up in a more or less randomly chosen location and see it is structured and built up we expect to meet people. When we don't, it immediately feels like a ghost town. If you enter a village and see no signs of occupation it gives you the creeps, and rightly so. But in Second Life that is the norm, because the population centers are indistinguishable from the 'nature preserves'.

When we think we are teleporting into inhabitated areas in Second Life we are actually doing something akin to diving into earth's atmosphere at a random point above the non-blue areas. We would not expect to hit a major crossroads or city then, but do expect so when teleporting in SL.

At those moments when we know exactly where the populated areas in SL are, we don't feel like we're lost. Except those population centres are not only points in space, but also points in time. I think population centres in SL are events (like conferences, meetings, concerts etc).

Empty and populated places in SL: points in space as well as time

Also I think people simply have no idea how big SL really is. We are so used to limited expanses of virtual land in games and simulations. (where you literally walk into the horizon, like in the Truman Show)

Although I believe SL is too empty to be able to provide enough random rewarding meetings and experiences, I also think our perception is skewed because of the fact that our usual clues and indicators for population centres don't hold true in SL.

Moved

In the past months this blog has suffered from some down-time as well as being very hard to reach at times.
That is why I have moved all the domains I was hosting at home to a web hosting service. I hope this way my blog and other sites will show better performance.

In the coming days I will have to iron out a couple of errors and recalibrate a couple of settings, so bear with me for a bit more, and then things will turn back to normal again.