are we more socialable?

I never knew much about second life until recently where I did the reading and attended the lecture on social media. I found it somewhat strange yet interesting as there are actually many people around the world that engage in second life, maintaining an avatar and spending tons of money on it.

Fortunately, I am not a stranger to this form of social media. I enjoy creating avatars and my first experience was ‘The Sims’. This computer game allows you to create virtual characters, build houses and make friends. However, my participation was not limited only to ‘The Sims’. When I was much younger, I stumbled upon this site called ‘Habbo’. Like second life, it allowed users to create an avatar and allowed us to interact and make friends. Out of curiosity, I created an avatar to explore the site and realized that I could easily make friends as I entered several different rooms. I could dance, eat and chat with several other avatars and realized that it was very easy to create a different personality and lie about my actual life. It was rather interesting as avatars could date each other one day and break up the very next day. Unlike some hard cores, I didn’t want to use real money to buy Habbo dollars as I thought it was a waste of money. Habbo dollars allow users to buy and decorate rooms.

Habbo is still available today but I suppose it is not as popular as second life. I am rather amazed with the graphics of second life and how users can ‘fly’. I was shocked that sex shops are also available and how a MUD player was able to seize control of another player’s avatar and virtually rape her. With new communications technology, users that are located miles apart can meet together real time as avatars and experience ‘life’ together.