I don’t know if I’m a journalist anymore these days. I mean instead of interviewing today I welcomed people to our Faces of Faith showcase and panel, chatted about inter-faith issues on SL, jumped to the desktop and spent more of my day using every social networking site that any one brain can conceive of to get the word out. You know the usual suspects: Yahoo Upcoming, Facebook, Myspace, to Last.Fm trying to get audio for our Faces of Faith Second Life showcase, to figuring out how to create a quick Web site on Squidoo and then thinking I need to train myself more on all this social media so then I went to Slideshare, to LibraryThing yes, even Amazon was social networking for me because I was looking up the 30 most read religion blogs. I put an ad out on the SL classifieds, the SL Herald, you name it, I was doing it just so I wouldn’t have to stand around waiting for the audience to come to. Please, somebody come look at our awesome multimedia on Blip TV, anyone out there, we’re talking here, who’s listening? And all of a sudden it hit me what my poor newspaper must feel like outside my doorstep, just waiting for me to pick it up and impart its knowledge upon me. I felt so helpless, just waiting for the throngs to push down our tents (in a good way of course). My avatar would droop its head and I would get logged out. The worse of the worse for me. “You are so idle that you are not fit to take up server bandwidth on SL.”

But the masses have not come yet and my brain tries to grasp all the many variables and think now, kara, think. It’s been more of trickle. If I were an avatar wanting to learn about religions in the RL where would I go, why would I come to Nowhereville? I meant Time just dissed SL for being one of the worst sites. Was it just too dimensional even though I thought I was thinking outside the box? (In SL can make a triangle out of that box.) Why did I not consider that when we were dropping prayer balls into the Plural Living tent we had to know which way avatars had to pray? Towards the sun? But people force the sun in SL, its deceptive. Towards the server? But it’s the wrong direction for some folks. In Australia some of our panelists will rise at 5 am on Sunday or Monday is it? Everything is so fluid, your avatar and personhood is like gel out here. And then just my avatar sits at the edge of our bucket island, Beth Odets comes along with her avatar Jewish mom, Liz (yes, it’s her RL mom) and they are in the synagogue putting out the candles and we’re all doing the Manischewitz dance and suddenly it’s just like Real Life random, disappointing and daunting at the same time. At the end of the day it is like my brain has imploded and I pick up the rubble. Next in line please…

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Second Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.