Virtual worlds didn’t so much predict the future as provide a giant sandbox in which to explore the different ways that the future could unfold.
In presentations, I often say that I could have learned about social media from Facebook, or user-generated content from youTube, but I ended up in Second Life instead – and by ending up there, was able to see that the future isn’t necessarily what the conventional wisdom says it will be.
I can’t imagine having any particular interest in things like on-line governance, privacy, identity, virtual commerce, law, economics, or 3D content development if it wasn’t for Second Life. By thinking about these things I started to realize that there were wider implications – that these weren’t just digital communities, these were pathfinders to a broader cultural change that might awaken us to the challenges in the way we organize our lives and enterprises.
And, through Second Life at least, we come to realize that the responsibility for how technology turns out is in large measure our own. We have the right and the obligation to lend our voice, energy and passion to whatever vision we have for the ways in which technology informs our lives, whether we view it simply as a tool or extension of who we are, as a site for culture, as platforms for enterprise and governance, or as just another gadget that we struggle to learn and adopt.
Through our often frustrating relationship to the companies who have their hands on the controls of these digital domains, we can learn that it is our personal responsibility to come to informed decisions about whether to invest our time, passion, and identity within someone else’s sandbox, or whether we prefer to strike out on our own.
We start to realize that the idea of the ‘State’ has an increasingly tenuous tie to government because we start to realize that the places where we derive value are controlled by non-state actors. As a result, we also start to rethink the nature of the enterprise and the interdependence we have on platform owners, communities, and wider ecosystems of value. Companies, schools, and organizations are no longer confined to geography or to the walls that contain them. (... More)
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