I cobbled together some rough notes for today's Beyond Broadcast workshop on marketing and politics in virtual worlds, and I thought I might as well go ahead and post 'em here:

Beyond Broadcast: Marketing and Politics in Virtual Worlds
Two great minds on cyberlife, Clay Shirky and MIT's Henry Jenkins have been engaged in online debate over Second Life, the hot participatory medium of the moment. Clay started it with a Valleywag post called "A Story Too Good to Check." Henry responded with "Get a (Second Life)!. Clay came back with Second Life, Games, and Virtual Worlds, Henry with More Second Thoughts on Second Life and then Clay again with Second Life: A response to Henry Jenkins. Got all that?

(There's a big question that I'm largely going to punt on -- which "virtual worlds" beyond Second Life, exactly, are we're talking about here? World of Warcraft is usually thrown into discussions at this point, but it seems to me that that's a pretty different beast -- a multi-player game more than a virtual world. Shirky makes an interesting point on this in one of those posts. The gist of is this: SL is a fairly challenging environment with a pretty steep learning curve, but as it's not really a "game," it doesn't train you to do anything difficult or productive. One can be a quite happy SL avatar flying through the air, which is one of the first skills taught on Orientation Island. But are we learning things in Second Life that we can port over to any possible future virtual worlds, whether that's SL v2 or some app still a glimmer in someone's eye?)

Clay's main concerns with SL are "demographic" -- in short: "the logic behind this belief is simple: most people who try Second Life don’t like it." On this point, Jenkins ask, if the real-time interactions suggested by virtual worlds like SL will "always represent a special class of uses which competes not with the web but with other teleconferencing technologies." But no matter, says Jenkins, "my interest in Second Life has little to nothing to do with the statistical dimensions of this argument. I've never been one who felt that arguments about cultural change could be reduced to counting things -- Second Life interests me as a particular model of participatory culture." But when it comes to selling widgets via Second Life or using it as a political communications tool, it's understandable to get caught up on the the question of numbers -- how many people actually actively use the medium?

Shirky talks about Second Life as the next in a line of somewhat failed immersive technologies like "LambdaMOO or Cyberion City." It's a certain cynicism (or maybe just healthy skepticism) that you see sometimes in people who have been around the tech world for a while and lived through the enormous hype and over promotion around virtual worlds. And there sure has been a flurry of press around Second Life over the last six months or so -- much of it overheated. Following a lot of that hype, a good number of big big corporations -- Toyota, American Apparel, Reebok, Dell, Nike, and more -- entered into Second Life and set up shop. Then there's the buzz in political circles. My old boss Governor Warner was the first major American politician to enter into Second Life back when he was considering making a run for the presidency. Then we saw the U.S. House of Representatives that set up shop in Second Life on the very day that Nancy Pelosi was named Speaker and the new Congress kicked off. There's an unofficial John Edwards for President Second Life HQ. On the non-profit political side, there are things like the Yak Shack, a project of the UK branch of Save the Child, and Camp Darfur.

Jenkins points to all this activity as a flaw in Shirky's thinking on SL. "To some degree, all of the corporate, academic, nonprofit, and foundation interest in SL is part of the hype which Shirky is dismissing here." This part is important, I think. What we have in Second Life is a shared space where organizations/individuals of differing levels of power and resources are interacting on the same grounds. It's like the New York City Marathon, where an amateur runner like myself can compete on the same course at the same time as some of the best athletes in the world. (Only they have fancier shoes.)

Jenkins (and others, for that matter) have delved into the costume or carnival-like aspects to Second Life, where identities can be swapped and hierarchies reordered. It's easy to get excited about these upendings, but they raise real questions when it comes to marketing and politics -- which, it can be argued, at some point rely upon interacting with the outside world (though less so for marketing than for politics, I think.) Jenkins admits that "I care only a little bit about the future of virtual worlds. I care a great deal about the future of participatory culture." But there are real questions about whether it's an amenable environment in which to executive the very serious tasks of marketing and politics. There are probably a few marketers and politicos questioning their SL plans after a recent incident where Anshe Chung, the supposed first Second Life millionaire, was attacked by giant flying penises during a press conference. And then there's the virtual world's first "terrorist" organization -- the Second Life Liberation Army.

All this discussion is all well and good, but there's a practical aspect to this -- what real applications of virtual marketing and politics are we seeing now? Moreover, is Second Life significantly different than other medium for marketing and politics than the ones we already are used to?

(I'd be remiss if I didn't take this change to make a personal plug. I wrote a paper on politics and Second Life for George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet. It's aimed at political practitioners and is fairly basic, but I hope that you might give it a read.)

-Nancy Scola