So yeah, it never stops getting mentioned here these days, but bad connections and low bandwidth on the part of SL's infrastructure has been keeping me out of the grid a lot this week. What...a...surprise, I know. But anyway, in the last couple of days I've been managing to get in for short periods of time, both during the day and at night, to get various errands done and to check out things that readers have been recommending. (Have your own recommendation, by the way, of a place or person you think should be written up here? Drop me a line at inthegrid [at] gmail.com to let me know.) And once again, the short visits at different times has gotten me thinking about the "daytime Second Life" versus the nighttime one, two very different societies indeed within this virtual world and with surprisingly little crossover. It's what always makes me laugh, after all, whenever I see someone in the mainstream media trying to define exactly what Second Life is; and that's because Second Life can't even define itself in its current incarnation, with too many different types of people doing too many different types of things for there to be a "general" type of resident to be profiled.

Here, for example, is one of the "daytime" things I recently checked out: a new device in the grid called "Second Talk," a scripted object that takes the form of a virtual Bluetooth headphone, that can sense other headphones that are around and tell you those people's Skype addresses. It's put out by a creative agency called Centric, and a free copy can be picked up at their virtual headquarters [Maui 253/42/23]. I haven't gotten to run into anyone else yet with a Second Talk device on, but from the description I can see how it could be pretty handy; how every time you walked into a club or other live event within the grid, your little headset would "sniff out" all the other people in the club you could call and talk with in real time that moment. Yeah, don't you wish you could have such a thing at real-life clubs sometimes?

My bigger point, though, is that such a device came from the employees of a very real company, one that counts Canon and Memorex among its many corporate clients, and that this is reflected in almost every detail of their Second Life presence; how their virtual land, for example, is a very real working office as well in their case, with me even running into an employee while there and having a short chat. As Neal Stephenson's seminal novel Snow Crash correctly predicted, virtual reality doesn't have to exclusively be the domain of the warrior-hacker-anime enthusiasts of the world; even in that original book, which inspired the creation of Second Life in the first place, Stephenson's Metaverse was also riddled with the "suits" of the world, who were never sporting weapons and whose avatars wore the same outfits their users did in real life. For better or for worse, there are now thousands and thousands of people who are in SL primarily to use it as a new means of communication; sure, in many cases to have fun as well, but most importantly to bring new assets to their personal and professional lives that they could never afford before. These people attend business meetings while in the grid, social meets-and-greets, conventions, tech conferences; they hand out cards, chat up clients, and very rarely sport bat wings or strap-on dildos.

Of course, this can then all be compared to one of my recent "nighttime" trips in the grid -- a stop by "Tattoo Night" at half-gentlemen-club half-nightclub BabyDollz [Amsterdam 2 145/238/25]. And yeah, even though I think Valleywag obsesses on the subject a little, they are right when they assert this -- that the financial backbone behind Second Life right now is its more tawdry elements, which can't exactly be explained as "hardcore adult" but rather more like "if MySpace people were allowed to show boobies and legally gamble." And indeed, say its detractors, this is exactly what Second Life is (or has become, or is bound to be) -- a slag-heap of the Web 2.0, where all the worst elements of social networking, cheap marketing and lowbrow entertainment come clashing together into a tsunami of overhype and duped jackasses.

But then again, this is the point where the kids inevitably say, "Jeez, lighten up, dad, we're just going to a club!" Because let's face it, again for better or for worse, for thousands and thousands of people in SL it is places like BabyDollz (and the literally thousands more like it) that hold the main attraction. For many, it is an outward extension of their social life, a chance to hang out with friends away from the "major" events that occur with them; you know, kind of like me and my friends in college in the '80s, when the biggest dance night of the week (Wednesday, starting around 10pm) would always start with a series of private parties around the city starting around 8pm, where all the excited undergrads would drink and try on outfits and bug their college-DJ friend with stupid requests and the like. These kids are just doing the virtual version of preclubbing, hanging out and having fun at the times they're not at the clubs themselves; just now with avatars and Skype, not Polaroid cameras and amphetamines like in my undergraduate days.

And therein lies what I think is the irony: that neither of these groups, the daytime or the nighttime crowd, are largely aware of each other and what the other group does, and for the public at large there seems to be no awareness that these two groups exist in the first place. I hear so much talk these days, it seems, about "who is in Second Life" and "what they're doing," and "why they like being there" and so on; these questions seem to negate the idea that, much like the internet itself, there are actually hoards of different people doing radically different things within the grid, some worth ridiculing and some worth applauding. Dismissing Second Life outright just because some idiotic things go on there (which they do, I agree with), seems to me like dismissing all printed paper material just because such things as "Teen Sassy Magazine" exist. I am not exactly a cheerleader for Second Life or Linden Lab (although for disclosure's sake, I should admit I have a resume being reviewed by them), and I'm not exactly a muckraker either; of much more interest to me, frankly, is what's being done within Second Life, by the independent artists, programmers and thinkers who are coming to it.

And speaking of which, that gets us into a whole other way of looking at Second Life, apart from the "daytime/nighttime" metaphor; of those who see it as the Tinkerer's Paradise, a sorta virtual den where every hobby of every middle-aged male in the history of time has been wrapped up into one interface. Check out, for example, a store I randomly came across recently called the Mission Style Furniture Gallery [Tilitr 194/45/22], and realize -- that for many people in Second Life, it is the chance to sit down and tinker together such finely-detailed virtual furniture that holds their real attention, away from any kind of interactive entertainment you could provide them at all. This is the sneaky and complex key to Second Life's ultimate success, and the thing that future competitors are going to have a hard time duplicating; that the grid almost perfectly brings together those who would like to build, those who conduct traditional business, those who do artistic experiments, and those who like mainstream culture, and gives them all a way to own intellectual property and exchange real money. Without those six points I just mentioned, you don't really have a grid like the one people get all crazy about.

So anyway, I think that's where I'll end my thoughts for today; and of course, you're welcome to add your thoughts as well to the comments of this entry, although please realize that there is always a small delay in that I hand-moderate them all. Here's hoping as always that service in the grid gets better soon! Sigh!