SL Is Another Country

Gidday Squatters,

Connie here. Well, as my last article generated so much comment and controversy (not), I have decided put nails to keyboard and write another.
I have wondered why it is that SL cannot seem to enthral people, or when we try to explain the place to those in 1st life, they look at you with a blank stare and go..”Huh”??
It seems to be a matter of perception as well. I like to think of SL as like another country. Many countries have an “image”, and so people think the whole place is like that. Many people think the U.S. is populated by rednecks from Smugville Idaho, with a closet full of guns, living next door to a crack house full of rappers who say “Yo” before pulling out a machine gun and marking out their territory with your entrails (Not true). Some think Australia, where I’m from, is full of bronzed Aussie’s with Elle Macpherson girlfriends, who live on the beach during the day, adjourn to the pub to sink pints of Lager, throw up over each other, wake the next morning, swim 1000 laps and win the Olympics (some true). Some even think the Irish are just mad. Now this may be true.

What I’m getting at is that SL suffers from the wrong image. I bet a lot of people out there, who have never been in, think we are all just sex mad deviants, with no critical faculties, a predilection for living in cold draughty castles and a need to say ‘Woot” at least once a day. As I was writing this, I hear concurrency spiked, and a reason put forward for that, was a story picked up my the worldwide media, about a couple who divorced, because the wife found out the husband was spending cash on virtual prostitutes in SL. http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/11/is_it_adultery.html

As usual, it’s the salacious story that gets people in. But it just perpetuates the perception of SL being populated by a bunch of beautiful losers. I argue that we need to change that perception.
I am as “tolerant” as anyone in here and believe that our diversity is what makes us strong. We have people from Prokofy (help, there’s a red under my bed) Neva, to Crap (I had leftover pizza for breakfast) Mariner, blogging and opining on all the minutiae of SL. We have people blogging remorselessly about every little prim that’s attachable to a body part. Some even get paid to have a positive opinion of the clothes they blog ( “ I squealed like a 13 year old and bought the fatpack”)….just like 1st life! Hell, even I roleplay my part as some sort of Flickr based Annie Leibovitz / clothes peg / Bikini supermodel/ ecoscientist.
We have our own form of “Government”. I call it Anarchototalitarianism. That is..”You WILL pay this tier increase, ‘cos you have nowhere else to go, but you can keep wearing a dick on each nipple if its expressing your art.”

We have our own social “Mores”. For example, nobody is “Ugly” and as everyone is so talented, we live in the virtual equivalent of the Italian Renaissance.
I haven’t even mentioned all the content creators who are the “soul” of SL. Many are true artists, and if people in 1st life saw some of the better examples, they would be gobsmacked too.
So, how to compress all this diversity into some sort of one line positive image of the country we call SL?
Perhaps we need some sort of TV Ad, inviting people to visit SL, like Australia does. Our tourist bureau has helped bankroll Baz Luhrmann’s latest Epic “Australia”. Now people will think all Aussie men look like Hugh Jackman, can ride a horse; be laconic and pull Nicole Kidman.
Don’t count on the Lindens to do it. They can’t even get decent pics up in the opening page of their website. Apart from the aesthetic aspect (the pics are CRAP), they haven’t changed them in over 6 months, perhaps more. Hell, they can’t even govern properly, let alone have their equivalent of the tourist bureau go the whole hog and try to generate some sort of positive spin on SL. As we Aussies would say, they couldn’t organise a pissup in a brewery.
Perhaps it’s up to us, the citizens of this country called SL, to work in our own little way to slowly change the perceptions of those outside of SL. Then maybe, just maybe, we will get people to take us seriously, come in and contribute in some positive fashion to this place we seem to spend so much of our time fussing and fighting over.