corporate colonization: on and offline.

In a recent post I mentioned the type of response that corporate invasions of a digital public space can expect. While pre-corporatized spaces (such as paid-subscription video games) are usually tolerant of colonization, free and anarchic spaces aren’t.

What’s interesting about this to me is the comparatively nonexistent backlash when a company invades a real-world public space, in blatant contravention of law. This is what illegalsigns.ca does, draw attention to how often, and how shamelessly the laws protecting public space are ignored for profit and marketing purposes.

This is only a good idea for companies as long as no one cares. Sadly, the kind of public outcry that makes such practices a bad idea is thousands of times more intense in Second Life than it would be in my home city of Toronto, where IllegalSigns operates.

It’s easy to understand why companies think injecting themselves into social networks, and virtual worlds, where they don’t offer anything useful, is a good idea. They’ve been conditioned by the real world to expect that such invasions will be met first by silence, and then by increased sales.

This happens in the real world because we’ve already accepted that marketing messages are unavoidable in public space, regardless of the law. This has already been accepted in the majority of online life, but not in free, immersive virtual worlds.

This is a battleground worth watching, because it’s the best indicator of how tolerant of marketing online identities are – these are the extremes of those who stand against it. If they surrender, we’ve all lost something. In real life, it’s easier to take a different route to avoid a sign, legal or no.

let's try that again (second life).

Upon re-reading, I realized I can summarize that entire Second Life post into one sentence.

As a direct consequence of not having a clear or profitable plan, the Second Life experiment has stayed relevant beyond it's logical shelf life.

stop talking about second life.

This slideshow is a great introduction to social media, why there is no option but to care, and what the basic rules are.  I’m not posting it for this reason, however.  I’m posting it because it brings up what so, so many slideshows, articles, and blog posts reference.

Second Life.

There’s nothing wrong with Second Life.  It’s a playground, an interesting way for people to test out ideas, and a virtual world where people get to decide their own identity, own actions, and own morality.

My only problem with Second Life is that I think it’s become more important as something to be trotted out by specialists, journalists, and scared executives, when they want to demonstrate an understanding of the new world media order, than it is as a world or platform.

Social media is normally about projected selves.  There are varying degrees of anonymity and realism, but the general outcome is a projected identity that reflects how the creator wants to be perceived.  When you read a blog, you are reading a blog written both by John Smith, and the guy John Smith wants you to think he is.

This is important, because the guy John Smith wants you to think he is is the guy who buys non-essential products.  Possessions are often social signifiers, and social media puts on display what kind of projected persona, and therefore what signifiers would interest the person making the content.

Second Life is, by and large, different.

Second Life is a fantastical wish fulfillment and exploration tool.  This is probably demonstrated best by the fact that off the bat, everyone can fly.  Wish fulfillment is useful, except when you consider that only realistic wishes get fulfilled.  And while someone might be able to find a servable niche in a virtual society where a hail of digital genitalia greets uninvited corporate presences, no one who operates mostly out of meatspace has yet.

And they keep trying.

People resist the comparison between World of Warcraft and Second Life, saying that SL isn’t about fantasy, or quests, or winning, it’s to explore.  But, other than a massively larger subscriber base, I’d argue from a business standpoint that there are a total of two differences that matter between WoW and SL.

WoW doesn’t let a corporation try to invade a realm that has no use for it, and WoW subscribers all demonstrably have disposable income that they use for entertainment.

Second Life just manages to keep the buzz going by being less easy to categorize.