New Media: Second Life

What is Second Life?

• Second Life (SL) is an Internet virtual world started in 2003, developed by Linden Research, Inc. (a.k.a. Linden Lab), a San Francisco company.
  
  
• Membership is free with one advanced level called premium.
  
  
• A downloadable Second Life Viewer enables residents to interact with each other through avatars, providing an extraordinarily advanced level of social networking combined with general aspects of a metaverse.
  
  
• Residents explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, undertake manufacturing and commercial wholesale and retail activities, create and trade their virtual property and services.
  
  
• Second Life was inspired mainly by the cyberpunk literary movement, notably Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash.
  
  
• Linden Lab's goal is to create a world like the Metaverse described by Stephenson, a user-defined world of general use in which people interact, do business, learn, play, and otherwise communicate.
  
  
• Second Life's virtual currency is the Linden dollar (Linden, or L$). It is exchangeable for US dollars in a marketplace consisting of residents, Linden Lab and real life companies. The current exchange rate is around US$4 = L$1000.
  
  
• Second Life is not a game. It does not have rules, points, scores, winners or losers, levels, an end-strategy, or most of the other characteristics of games.
  
  
• It is a semi-structured virtual environment where characters undertake activities for the purpose of personal empowerment and enjoyment.
  
  
• More than 12 million accounts have been registered to date and membership is growing at nearly one million per month.