Get a first life now
My Second Life is becoming intoxicating. First life or RL is beginning to fade, like the background on my desktop which I hardly see between my Final Cut windows and SL. I am quickly entering the world of our panelists.
This morning I woke up with the usual “gotta give the notecards” (said to the tone of “gotta make the doughnuts”) about Sunday’s panel making sure to put out some fires, celebrating some small victories like Rita J. King’s blogging about us, or touching base with the team (our editor Bob Calo is sporting some surfer clothes today and we even got him shoes!). But today was the day I was going to interview Tom Boellstorf and, if all went well, even Beth Odets, her mother (was it really her mom or just an avatar named “Jewish mother”) and her father who all have avatars in SL and practice their faith at the synagogue. (Yes, I am featuring them in my story, but who reads?).
As in anything in Real life, SL has the beauty of arbitrariness, but compressed into a smaller window and time frame. Upon instant messaging Beth (instant message is like email for SLers) I realized I was just going to have to play it by ear to say the least, between weddings, avatars protesting casinos, wrong rugs laid down on tent floors, and Tom’s balloon ride. Right.
Then there was the issue of doing something for that empty tent we had on the island for the panelists. How to proceed? They asked for it, we created it. But nothing. Was I skeptical of this participatory model working in SL? Was it more like cynical. What baby, what bathwater?
Am I completely crazy to even think of doing multimedia in Second Life? I mean it’s a story that needs to be told right? So I revert back to the video camera, record my conversation, type, anything, I do it. I want the reader/viewer/the audience to get the feeling and being completely immersed in it the way I am right now. So today, I typed notes, chatted, video taped and recorded audio just to find a way to tell this story with any tool available to me. Part of was the getting creative factor, part of it was sheer madness. Yesterday I was a social networker, today I’m a journalist again.
