(Question 3 of 10)
Second Life, particularly in its earlier years, was very much a society with a utopian feel and people tended to act as such. People went out of their way to be friendly and assist new residents and I believe they tended to tailor their behavior to what was beneficial for the society as a whole. Although these attitudes still exist in some form, they have slowly been eroded and replaced by more self serving attitudes. Similarly to how the experience would be different from living in a small rural town to living in a large urban city. I find that people not longer go out of their way to talk to strangers in the street or even say “Hi” as they once did. There is an increasing level of distrust of new residents as individual employ alternate accounts (alts) for underhanded purposes, often for things that are against the Terms of Service or Community Standards but harder to identify or trace with alt avatars.
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Gosh I sure wish I'd been here when SL was like you describe it.. Alts running around breaking up relationships and "Anonymous" postings on blogs.. Anonymity doesn't always bring out the best in people.
ReplyDelete(Confession: I too have an alt, you'll know it when you see it.. Feel free to talk to me when you see me, I'll even friend you if you'd like. I just make myself "invisible" to friends with my alt so I can stay out of the IM stream long enough to do other things ~counsel people, take classes~. I hope that doesn't sound bad.)