[sldev] [MISC-0000] A message from a Stakeholder: Down the Keyhole

[Dzonatas]

Prokofy even has a slight change of heart here from the normal run on 'Life:

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/10/the-geek-keyhol.html

I know some are afraid to click on that, so let me repost it here =p

Worthwhile to read

---

I've been debating Aldon Hynes, <http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/2567> 
whom I only know from recent reading of his blog. Because his blog has a 
really frustrating -- typically geek! -- openID system to register 
(believe, I've worked OPENID stuff for ages and have a tremendous and 
justified critique of it), and a need to generate a new password if you 
try to use the standard registration -- AND apparently a word limit much 
smaller than typepads, I'm putting the answer here. I can't tell if it 
posted there.

The answer to Aldon can in part take up the need for a rebuttal to Grey 
on Metaversed.com 
<http://metaversed.com/18-oct-2007/second-rant-12-big-media-sheep-and-death-classifieds> 
which I was prevented from using even before my banning due to the 
comments being closed. I'll have more to say to Grey and deanpence and 
others from that thread in the next post.

This is a post about the huge perception problem we all face in SL, and 
it's time for those of you who can understand this to declare war on it, 
in ways that I"ve hardly been able to do in Second Life as much of an 
Infamous Antagonist as I've been -- the walls of geeky perception really 
need to be broken down and the geeks really, really need to stop seeing 
through their keyholes. They get insulted even being told they see 
through a keyhole, but it needs to be burned in: through their 
demographics of 20-something or 30-something male IT guys, with insolent 
Internet culture making do where culture in the humanities might have 
been imbibed 30 years ago; with their cynicism and me-first and 
entitlement outlook; with their belief that everything should be like 
"the Internet" and everything should avoid the fearful 1990s that they 
may have even missed, still watching Sesame Street.

Add to that those in their late 30s who DO understand the 1990s and 
their very, very VERY mistaken and deep-seated belief that "we can't 
have Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve" "just because we don't like it and 
history can't be allowed to repeat because we say so", and we have a 
really big factor for the destruction of what *is* revolutionary about 
SL and is now being stepped on -- user-content and amateur user 
consumption and generation concentric communities that bond through 
socializing or collaborative work who need protection of their privacy, 
IP, and space through land-based models of geographical contiguous space 
enabled for building protective structures emulating both real life, and 
serving as symbolism for trusted communication in SL. SL is a walled 
garden of walled gardens -- this has its plusses and minuses, but as 
long as some people tend to the public commons and seek collaboration 
across barriers, it need not be destructive. What is far more 
destructive is tearing down the walls in the name of "Information wants 
to be free," which only succeeds in making the fledgling space horribly 
vulnerable to large corporations rushing n and filling the vacuum with 
mass culture of the push kind, not the user-generated kind -- which is 
exactly what we are seeing in SL now.

In other words, the fear, hatred, and loathing of Prodigy, AOL, and 
Compuserve will get us something that will merely be a mightier AOL in 
the end.

Dear Aldon,

I'm glad your willing to discuss an opinion you don't like -- or don't 
understand (yet) rather than disparaging it, which happens all too often 
-- and when that happens, you can bet that I will fight back hard, 
because I am just as smart, have just as much experience, and have just 
as much knowledge -- if not more -- as you, merely from other fields, 
and from another Second Life that you might be willing to concede 
exists, but which you don't see. I can't emphasize that enough: your 
take on SL is a keyhole, and while you may find that insulting, it has 
to be said because you just aren't panning out to understand what is at 
stake for OTHER PEOPLE among the 50,000 logging on who are NOT in the 
5,000 demographics/social graph of you and your friends.

First of all, while you've used reason and logic to come up with the CBS 
viewer numbers, they aren't necessarily "the right answer". I or anyone 
else could use a different logic path and come up with something different.

First, let's listen to what Anthony Zuiker *himself* says about the 
characteristic pattern of TV-Internet tie-ins. He says the CBS sites 
will experience as much as 50 percent more log-ons. That means out of 
the existing pool of people willing to go on the Internet at all 
watching the show -- which is NOT the entire pool of viewers (some may 
not even have Internet access!), you will have, among them, 50 percent 
more of them willing to *go on the Internet*. So I put that figure as 
something like 280,000 (and someone could argue it to be much more if 
they like), and then I put the figure of the subset of *that* pool to be 
28,000 willing to log on to Second Life -- so that's actually double 
what you're getting, but that's because I'm going to assume that some 
younger, WoW-playing demographic won't have a problem with the concept 
of downloading a client and entering a world.

But both of our numbers are basically purely speculative. Nobody really 
knows and that's why this must be understood as an experiment, and not 
the last word. The cross-over from TV to virtual worlds is not known. 
What we know from those who actually showed up to be counted, and that 
included a lot of SL existing residents rubber-necking, was no more than 
4,000 at any given time for 3 hours, 10 per island (420 islands) as we 
all could vividly see on the map that 3 islands had 100, many were 
empty, and many had only 2-10 max. So whether 728 as Cocoanut Koala 
physically counted, or 4,000 x 3 = 12,000 as I was willing to say, we're 
talking about a far, far lower response that was possible -- and this 
isn't only due to the physical barriers, if 12,000 could still cross the 
physical barriers (wrong graphics card, download not working, gives up 
after one minute, etc.) (and I'll be the first to concede these 
thousands had a lot of existing SL members)

Of course, as we know from SL clunkiness they *will* experience 
interface frustrations. And they *did*. And a lot of them were lost. 
Even so, enough of a pool resulted to say some thousands of people will 
be signing up and have an option to stay. Because ESC is a private 
company, we many never know the truth of whether they came or retained 
-- something that Linden Lab, far more transparent, is willing routinely 
to tell us each month. So as a public hugely affected by this shared 
grid that suddenly expanded by 420 islands that may add as many as 4,000 
or more concommitant logs, we need to understand these real numbers and 
how it will affect the economy.

The next problem you are having is that you are making the assumption 
that because you personally, and your little circle of even 50 friends 
never use classifieds, that "nobody" uses classifieds, that you are 
willing to say you are an "anomaly" but don't REALLY believe it, and 
therefore default to a view that classifieds are not needed, aren't 
important, don't affect the economy, and can be removed, even if people 
pay a lot of money for them.

This is the sort of claim made by "Grey" on Metaversed 
<http://metaversed.com/18-oct-2007/second-rant-12-big-media-sheep-and-death-classifieds>, 
and as I said with him, you are looking through SL through your keyhole, 
assumping that you as a programmer/creator/artistic intelligentia are a 
typical user with typical behaviour pattern -- you aren't. Grey counters 
that by saying, oh, but I've been here for 2 years and fly around a lot. 
To which I can say: fly around some more, and get it.

Another thing that those with this keyhole perspective instantly claim 
-- falsely -- is that only those with land rentals or sales care about 
classifieds and that's why it looms large in their concepts. This is 
insulting and silly -- people in the land business aren't just flipping 
parcels, in the rentals sector especially they are seeing what people DO 
with land and of those 50,000 logging on at any given time, MOST ARE ON 
LAND, and it's safe to say a majority rent or own or stay with friends 
renting. MOST are not flying around and making Moebius strips in a 
sandbox. That flies against a very deep, deep philsophical belief of 
tekkies that they feel is "oh so wrong" but it's the truth of Second Life.

Those who don't understand classifieds are leading to sales of many 
OTHER sectors outside of land (and take place ON land, of course) also 
have a correlary of "we don't need land to have fun" perspective which 
is one that I always chuckle for, as all content must be placed on 
*somebody's* land for which *somebody* has to pay.

I have been in SL for 3 years as a landlord and literally had tens of 
thousands of customers. Have you? I'm going to be like Scoble's famous 
podcast about his RSS feed knowledge now and push the point saying "Do 
you?". At any given day I have at least some 1,200-1,500 people in land 
groups spread over 60 sims many of them constantly IMing me for service. 
Do you? These constantly churn, as I specialize in having newbies 
communities and modest discount rentals for midbies to help them adjust 
to SL and get started in business. Do you have customers like that? I 
constantly help many more people than I even rent to because many don't 
rent and keep looking, and I come to learn their tastes and concerns. Do 
you? The hurdles to getting started in business for people *not* like 
you -- of which there are gadzillion in SL -- are tremendous for these 
people. Are you in touch with them, hearing their stories?

Say you're a black female 20-something worker in a RL call center in 
Atlanta who dreams of a dress shop or club with vendors in it in SL, who 
has a low income, or whose husband or parent won't let her use the 
credit card. She comes in and camps, dances, maybe even turns tricks, 
event-hosts, plays casinos or Tringo, does whatever she can to amass her 
first capital -- she's motivated, savvy, quick to learn culture, but not 
tremendously full of capacity. She might start first with a boyfriend 
richer than she, but guide his shopping dollar for furniture, prefabs, 
and rentals, all using classifieds/search. She works toward making her 
own shop. She's tremendously reliant on classifieds to get her store 
noticed -- she has none of the social capital you do with a core of 
geeky or creative friends you've accessed through your i-Phone, or 
conferences, or Twitter or your Ivy League College or whatever sources 
of social capital you have (and the presence of OPENID on your site lets 
me know you're a geek : )

She will put everything into that $50 classified and even up it to $500 
classified to try to get noticed among the gadzillion dress stores which 
are dominated by a few oldby FIC types who had lots of Linden support in 
their day and who today still dominate the market through a complex 
induction and apprentice system not unlike the Middle Ages, and about as 
far from "the Internet age" with its frictionless entry to economies as 
you can imagine (i.e. it relies utterly on connections and status and 
ranking and class). She will build out social circles from clubs, 
events, that shop, and rely on everything from word-of-mouth to flybys 
but *it's not enough* and she, like thousands of other new entrants to 
the economy, whether they sell a $5 t-shirt of a $2500 brilliant new 
scripted widget, need a democratic, mass, accessible means of getting 
into the economy that doesn't rely on Lindens, calling cards, FIC 
apprenticeship, getting seen in the right boutique, making a splash on a 
forums or blog. Those things are important, they're needed for the 
top-earners of the economy who don't bother with classifieds (although 
if you peek, you'll see a log of them do use them!; but they cannot work 
for *everybody*.

A plain old-fashioned "shopper" type of ad of the sort millions use 
every day in Craigslist or in their local pennysavers is what they need 
out of Second Life. YOU probably don't even need those things in first 
life, as YOU may never have a burning need to sell your hair curler set 
to buy your next mixer. But they do.

So aside from that black female entrepreneur, of which there are many, 
there are hordes of demographics not-like-you -- Puerto Ricans from 
Philadelphia who buy gangster clothing and form gangs or -- breaking 
your stereotypes -- take up life as gay poets; retired white postal 
workers from Kenosha who hang out in Gorean sims as weekend whippers -- 
or, breaking your stereotype, start a non-profit group against the war 
in Iraq; 20-something Asian college students with Internet access at 
home and college but not a lot of disposable income who play war games 
-- or, breaking your stereotype, become dress designers, not coders; 
part-time Walmart clerks and soccer moms with one sim of 20 rentals -- 
or, breaking your stereotype, make the top selling animations and 
scripts in their sector -- you name it. Not to mention the 60 percent 
*non-Americans* pouring in the door -- Brazilians, Russians, and 
Japanese, all of whom are my customers or from whom I rent mall space.

THESE PEOPLE who far, far outnumber your demographic use classifieds 
heavily -- and in fact use SEARCH PLACES for the cheaper $30 even more! 
-- to get 80 percent of the sales going on in Second Life. YOUR sales 
may depend on your high-class Tupperware-like party of very niched, 
geeky, plugged in, designer/programmer friends. But THEIR sales are not 
going to get noticed that way; indeed, their products, services, events 
are in fact beneath your scorn, typically, as most people in the 10 
percent geek/designer demographic that make content and opinion in SL 
are upper middle class to wealthy, and mass taste, and mass class 
affairs, are hateful to them. Indeed, a lot of my time in SL in these 3 
years is trying to pry their hateful fingers off the mechanisms people 
in the mass classes need for commerce -- events list open to any kind of 
event, including one of mass taste; forums ads for land sales and 
rentals, not just for high-end FIC designers and geeks on colour sims; 
telehub halls and classifieds that enable people to buy into the economy 
at an open and fixed cost, even if high, rather than struggle to suck up 
to a prim diva.

Your experience with the OnRez client is only your experience, because 
you aren't using SEARCH as heavily as I do and as my customers do. I and 
many others use search as a land management tool -- now it will be 
broken for that (i.e. sorting by traffic to see where more sales/traffic 
take place, etc.). No, I don't use campers or lucky chairs, they're 
prohibited, and yes, I have a lot more healthier respect for traffic 
merited by people working hard and getting real visitors than you do, as 
you are willing to remove traffic from the system as it is now -- you 
hate it because it's gamed no doubt like most of your cluster of 
opinions -- and you're willing to throw the baby of merited traffic of 
those entering the economy as newbies with the bathwater of midbies who 
use camped up results in search as the poor-man's classifieds.

If I watch a Brazilian furniture maker, a Japanese dress designer, or 
the gal in Atlanta struggle day after day without campers to bring 
people to their stores and work their way up the traffic merit ladder to 
get their sales and *make it in SL* even at a modest level, I don't cut 
it out over a hysterical and geeky belief that it is "gamed" and "like 
AOL" and "not like the Internet". I tell you that the *real* 
revolutionary thing about social media is THIS, and NOT your scorn of 
walled gardens based on your fear of failure of the 1990s.

THIS, because it's -- NEWS FLASH -- not just for you, but for everybody.

What we have now with the ONREZ viewer is a very severe problem: the 
wiping out of the first view of an interface that used to instantly 
deliver into the central range of vision CLASSIFIEDS and PLACES upon 
hitting SEARCH, which as I explain, is what people use for SALES -- 
people NOT like you.

Now, we have a small SEARCH box which dredges up SEARCH ALL, which is 
the least used, and poorest mechanism for search in SL. Most people use 
PLACES to find things more accurately precisely because ALL is dreding 
out of Groups, People, Land for Sale, etc. and creating chaos and poor 
results. I've been discovering that geeks who hate SL search so much, 
and think it is "broken" are ONLY using this SEARCH ALL function, in the 
mistaken believe that it "Should be like Google" and "have the most in 
it" and that if they use Googlean closed quotes, they can get "better 
results" -- all entirely faulty logic -- SL's search works like 
amazon.com. If you don't plug your search term into a pull-down section 
like BOOKS or ELECTRONICS and have a word like "iron" you will dredge 
through kitchenware in search of something on the Iron Age, etc.)

As for your claim, "I will note that when I do searches using the search 
box in OnRez, I often refine my search using the tabs on the top of the 
results that take you to the standard Second Life searches" -- you're 
forgetting that most people aren't Internet 
geeks/programmers/designers/Sheep fanclub members like you, and they 
look around not for other tabs somewhere underneath their present view 
on an interface, they begin clicking on the bars of their RESULTS, and 
finding them FRUSTRATING, they close the window and default to press on 
SHOP in the right-view spot, or fly into the store right in front of 
them provided by the Sheep.

I'm not one of those people concerned about corporations on the 
Internet. I'm not some geeky socialist Well-user eating granola. I'm 
fine with capitalism, corporations, and big networks coming into SL -- I 
used to work for some of them as a translator. That's not at issue.

What is at issue for me is ensuring a liberal, free, democratic society 
where there is a level playing field for the free entrepreneur and 
concern for small business and the formation of the middle class as much 
as these big corporations. Pluralism. There is NOT that if large 
corporations come in, subdue the population into inhabitants of company 
towns, and force-feed them content, wiping out the middle class as much 
as Bush has helped to wipe out the middle class in America.

We *don't know yet* if the CSINY people will dump these lame games that 
will take them about a half hour to burn through, and do more than 
socialize against a cartoony NY backroom with other TV-watchers and buy 
from the specially force-fed 12 designers on the Sheep sims who are in 
the Sheeps' feted commerce circle.

We can't know - yet -- if they will begin to consume elsewhere in an 
economy they can't even SEE in that viewer, especially as their masters 
-- like you -- will be telling them don't even bother to search in 
classifieds, they are for low-life chumps. They won't bother to be able 
to try to make something and enter the economy at a rung far, far lower 
than the FIC flagship stores on Sheep's Fifth Avenue -- because they'll 
be told the search is broken, shop with us, don't use classifieds for 
sales, buy, don't make. We're the makers; you aren't.

I don't know if ANY of this is beginning to sink in with you. But as you 
may know from my blog, I'm prepared to fight for this understanding of 
SL -- which I can see vividly from a million impressions -- because it 
is a very, very important one. You may be looking at life through 
another viewer. That doesn't mean that you feel the real world of Second 
Life beneath your feet.




-- 
Power to Change the Void
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