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Author Archives: andrea_arellano
I am still trying to figure out ShiftSpace but in the meantime I posted a note on:
http://everything2.com/title/New%2520York%2520University
Everything2 is a kind of wiki, a web-based collaborative community of user-submitted written material covering a wide range of topics and genres. I find it very frustrating because the content is moderated for quality not subject material. I looked up NYU and came across a kind of flawed definition of NYU (the first one on the webpage). ShiftSpace allowed me to justify some aspects that I found wrong with the definition.
In this podcast I explain how Oxfam America used grassroots activism and strategic media to draw attention to Ethiopian coffee farmers.
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My last travelogue got me interested in how non-profits are utilizing new media to gain awareness and raise more funds. The fact that the non-profit island on SL had more activity than others made me want to explore for my fourth travelogue the different initiatives Non-profits are taking to get their voice heard through new media. It seems like non-profits are beginning to use platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to help fill in the gaps where traditional media is falling through. Social media seems to provide non-profits with the ability to acquire attention for their cause, develop community relationships and trigger conversations in ways that traditional marketing has not been able to do before.
Throughout my travelogue Pascui Carlucci and I have embarked on a journey through Second Life to try to find out if the virtual world is truly being cleaned up and if the whole concept of pitching it as an online schoolhouse is working. After the bank meltdowns on SL due to the real recession in the real world, the restrictions put on adult content and the empty school campuses the whole concept, to me seems to be failing.
There were some things on SL that I found were still booming. There is an Island called the Nonprofit Commons. This space is a venue for forward thinking nonprofits to share ideas, challenges while enhancing personal relationships. There are exciting things that happen on the island such as events, social gatherings and meetings. When Pascui Carlucci and I visited the island it had traffic of 2,087. They had donation boxes, were offering free t-shirts of different organizations and the island, they had information about the non-profits. I had the opportunity to converse with some avatars about the island and they were all extremely enthusiastic about it and all mentioned that I should go onto the blog to find out more about the island. The blog seemed to have very recent posts from people that were extremely involved.
In my previous posts some of you had commented on how much traffic the places I was reporting on received. I went back to checkout the NYU Island and it has 32 hits, the Princeton island has 977 and the nude island had 47896 hits. I don’t know how they measure the traffic because when I visited these places they were mostly empty. However, we can see that the number of hits the nude island gets is much more that the online universities….hmmmm failed strategy?? Nonetheless the non-profits got more hits than the online universities.
After my research I have come to the conclusion that the best days of SL have passed and that the concept of virtual worlds has shifted. There are new virtual worlds arising for different reasons. For example music artists such as Aerosmith, Run DMC and Robbie Williams are all creating virtual worlds to offer fans education, art to collaborative jamming, and simply a new way to talk to people. Goodbye SL.
In the attempt to “clean up” Second Life they are cracking down on issues such as gambling, prostitution and adult content. In one of my previous posts Dylan posted an article that clearly stated what the “adult changes” in SL would look like. They are as follows:
1. Creation of a Red Zone Adult Island
2. Filtered Search Results
3. Payment/ Age Verification
4. Estate Owners can Flag Adult Content
5. Guidelines on what is “Adult” Coming Soon.
I am proud to report that both Pascui Carlucci and I have set out on our exploration of SL. It only seemed appropriate to start our exploration on the NYU campus on SL. YES, that is right, NYU has a virtual campus on SL and I wanted to learn more about it. Upon arrival I got a message greeting me that read like this:
“Greetings! This parcel has been acquired by NYU’s ITS organization. Our Basic mission is to establish an NYU presence in Second Life; to evaluate pedagogies; to test network configuration & performance; to evaluate security & safety issues; to test the use of streaming media & device control; to assess group & individual resource sharing & collaboration opportunities.”
So my third travelogue will be focusing completely on the virtual world of Second Life and how recent events have made them shift their strategy. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world created by its users. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown and today is inhabited by millions of residents from around the globe. However, in the past year SL has begun to feel the same effect as us in the real world. There has been a virtual-bank meltdown and a lot of the banks that were in SL have lost big sums of money and backed out of the scene completely. Banks nowadays are looking to cut costs and SL is not a priority for them.
Also, due to the nature of SL it has become a place of fantasy. Unfortunately a lot of people are utilizing this virtual world to take part in offensive acts such as: public sex, rape and child pornography. So as mentioned in my previous post, Linden Lab (the creator of Second Life) has decided to clean up SL’s image and is now pitching itself as an online schoolhouse. They will focus on holding more educational events, community meetings and cultural events.
My travelogue will research how SL is changing. I will do this mostly through fieldwork with the help of my friendly avatar Pascui Carlucci. Meet her:
I want to see if the change in strategy is reflected throughout SL and if so I ask myself if it is truly a new beginning for them or the end? Stay tuned…
