The Academic fascination with all things Internet

Okay, I know that academics like to think of themselves on the cutting edge, but what I've been noticing over the last year or so is this HUGE fascination with all things Internet by professors and the academic community. Yes, I'm guilty of it as well, as my last paper was on romantic communication involving self-esteem and Myspace.

But there's another layer to this fascination that I'm finding equally fascinating only because I was one of that unlabeled generation that grew up adopting the Internet as it was happening, not pre-Internet or post-Internet. To explain this further, let me take a virtual world that seems to be overwhelmingly talked about in both academia AND the political sphere. I'm talking about Second Life, a massive mulitplayer online role playing game.

People running for office think it is important to have an avatar (a character in the game that looks like them, or whatever they want to represent them) running around in Second Life. Currently, I'm taking a course on mass communication that will involve all of us creating characters in Second Life, interacting with each other, and then writing a paper on our second life persona observations/interactions. Well, as someone who grew up with the infancy of Second Life, there's a little underbelly of a secret that no one seems to want to talk about: Second Life used to be nothing but simulated pornography. People would create avatars and then "hook up". Gambling used to be the highest grossing activity in the game, and I mean real world gambling with real world dollars being played with an exchange rate of Linden dollars (the in game currency). But again, what was fascinating is that there was so much sex going on in the game that most of the businesses set up in this sandbox are sex businesses. And people are selling animations (because they code them and then put them up for sale so you can use them yourself), and those animations are...well...quite sexual and extremely explicit in the variations they use. If bondage is your thing, you can walk down any street in Second Life, and there are bondage dungeons set up all over the place. What you won't find is other players. For some reason, the place exists like a ghost town, no matter what promoters like to say about it. The only time you're really going to see a group of people is when something from the outside of the game has announced that is going to happen inside the game (like a press conference, or some publicity generating activity from an already established real world corporation). So, what academics really have the opportunity to study is momentary expressions of people interacting based on events fueled outside the world, or they can study peep show pornography, if they're lucky enough to catch some embarrassed player in the act.

Stumble It!