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Sponsored by:  My girlfriend is a Myspace addict. Not a day goes by that she does not get on. All of my friends are Myspace fanatics. Yet, not a single one of them are on Second Life. A few have tried and they all got bored because, quote "There's nothing to do on there." My rebuttal to them, “If you didn't have any friends on Myspace, what would you do on there? Because whatever you do on myspace, you can do the same in Second Life, and more.”
What people do not see in Second Life, or any virtual worlds for that matter, is that it most represents the beginning of a new form of social network. Why have a page on Myspace or when you can own a house on Second Life? Why post pictures of yourself or your friends on Facebook when you can frame them up in your living room. Why post messages on boards when you your friends can congregate at one location and talk amongst each other? One of the reasons not many people get on SL is because they do not have the hardware to support the program. Once the hardware starts catching up with the software, I have no doubt that my network will grow to include more of my Real Life friends.
But it doesn't end there. Second Life takes people beyond their circle of friends and beseeches them to extend their network to strangers. It eliminates some of the negative attributes that undoubtedly constitute people's social behaviors and perception, be it consciously or not. At one point or another in our lives, we all have made premature judgments on people we don't know based on insignificant factors such as race, gender, wealth, or disabilities only to find out that we were dead wrong about them. But not in Second Life. There is no such thing as racism in SL. You can't really be prejudice against a fire-breathing dragon. When a customer talks with or contacts us about a problem, we don't make any premature judgments based on how much they have with us or how they look. Everyone at our bank gets the same treatment, whether they have 100L or 1,000,000L.
We all start with a clean slate. Everyone can befriend strangers without sub-consciously worrying about their shortcomings. How we are perceived by others is based on who we are, not what we are. That saying might be a cliché, but nowhere does that hold true to its form more than in Second Life. If you lack friends in Second Life, it is not because you lack the material wealth or desired physical attributes, but it's probably because you lack the inner characteristics required to be a friend. In that essence, Second Life really does offer what everyone wants: a Second Chance.
-Arbitrage Wise
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