A Conversation with Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff about Second Life

A Note about my Generative AI Usage: I had promised that I would be transparent about my use of GenAI on my blog, but I realized that I had fallen out of the habit of putting a statement at the top of every blogpost! In this particular post, I used Claude AI in three ways:

First, I used it to brainstorm ideas for interview questions in my talk with Tom, and I did use a few of the questions it came up with in our conversation (as well as a few of my own).

Second, I asked Claude to recommend the best tool for recording our conversation (Tom had agreed to this recording, by the way). At first it recommended OBS, but I found that too complicated, so I asked Claude again, and this time it recommended Audacity, and it even gave me step-by-step instructions on how to set it up to work with my headphones and with Second Life.

Third, I gave Claude AI the completed one-hour WAV audio file of the interview, and asked it to create a written transcript. I used quotes from that transcript in this blogpost. This last step saved me hours of time!

My main male avatar, Heath Homewood, talking with Tom Boellstorff’s avatar, Tom Bukowski, at Heath’s Linden Home on Monday, November 2nd, 2026

I was surprised and pleased when Dr. Tom Boellstorff reached out to comment on a previous blogpost, when I mentioned that I was going to read and review his 2008 book, Coming of Age in Second Life (which I did here). Tom, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, wrote this field study of Second Life residents, and he offered me an opportunity to chat about how SL has changed since he wrote his book. We agreed to meet in-world, at Heath Homewood’s Linden Home. Below is a partial transcript of our conversation.

Ryan: Thank you so much for joining me today, Tom. I really do appreciate it. I was surprised when you reached out via the comments on my blog, but I was also pleased.

Tom: And I’m a fan of your blog. I always love seeing your blog.

Ryan: Yeah, I’m actually a fan of your work as well. This is the first time that we’ve really actually had a full-length conversation, although I have attended at least one event where you gave a presentation. And I do have a list of questions, but they’re just starting points. I should let you know that I read your 2008 book. It was in my library at the University of Manitoba, and I did read it and enjoyed it. I have not read your second edition with a new preface, but I’m assuming it’s just a new preface and the rest of the book was the same. Or am I not correct?

Tom: That’s correct. It’s just the same. And, you know, in the years since, I’ve published a bunch of articles about Second Life and other kinds of topics. I have a new article just coming out, like, sort of this week. And I also did a book about methods for doing research in virtual worlds with three friends of mine. And then, almost two years ago now, I published a historical book about the Intellivision video game system from the 1980s with MIT Press, also with a colleague. So I’ve been keeping busy on other things, but the Second Life book was really wonderful to do. Since then, I did the disability research project, a project about COVID — you might have seen a couple of films. Second Life has just been a fascinating, wonderful place. What people do here is so amazing and fascinating, and part of obviously bigger things happening on the internet. So it’s been great. I’m really a big fan of your blog, and I’m happy to chat about whatever questions you’ve got. And like you said, we can use those as launching points and just have a nice chat.

Ryan: I’d like that. Thank you. Your fieldwork in Second Life occurred between 2004 and 2007. Do you feel that Second Life really came of age during that time?

Tom: Yes. You know, whenever you do any kind of research — and my first two books are about Indonesia, right? I originally did research in Indonesia, so this was not my first research project as an anthropologist. And I was glad that I got to do many years of research in the physical world in Indonesia; that gave me a lot of tools and experience for knowing how to do this kind of research. When I started my Second Life work — and I actually had thought about doing research in The Sims Online or some other things that were around; I was looking at several different virtual worlds — I ended up deciding that Second Life would be really interesting. And at that point, it had been publicly released for less than a year, and there were only about 2,500 residents when I started.

Ryan: Okay.

Tom: So I really was an oldbie [old-time SL resident]. So in that sense, it did come of age. As part of my research, sort of learning the lay of the land, I actually flew over all of Second Life and took notes on all of the builds. I met a lot of people that way. It took me about two and a half, three weeks to fly over every inch of land in Second Life.

Ryan: Wow.

Tom: Can you imagine doing that now? You wouldn’t even be able to keep up. Because back then, it was one little continent, and there was only one island, right? Avalon. There was only one standalone sim, one island. It was Avalon. And that was it. All there was was the mainland. And the mainland, if you see the old maps, was very, very small compared to nowadays. I was able to watch it grow. By the time I finished that primary research in 2006, 2007 — and obviously I’ve been doing a lot in the years since — Second Life was more or less the size it is now. It’s sort of held steady, peaking out around 40,000 maximum concurrency, a little more. And the size of the world in terms of the mainland and the islands has been more or less holding steady since then…

I started in 2004. And especially in that first year, every hour at the top of the hour, a Linden would come on and send a little blue box — announcements that were grid-wide. Everyone who was in-world would get it, saying, “Hey, this hour there’s a dance at the shelter, and there’s this happening, and there’s this happening.” There would be hourly announcements blasted to the entire grid. That’s how small it was. That did not happen [later].

Ryan: Yeah, obviously that is something that wouldn’t scale well with the current expanse of Second Life. I wanted to ask you: after you finished your fieldwork in 2007 and published your book in 2008, how often have you come back to Second Life since? I know that you talked a little bit about your virtual worlds and disability work with the NSF project with Donna Davis, and then the pandemic-era research in Second Life and Animal Crossing. But how often do you actually come back to visit?

Tom: It’s very much sort of like what you’re saying. It comes and goes depending on my other commitments. When I have a research project going and I’m actually trying to get a new one going, then I might be in-world a lot. And then if I’m writing, at the end of a research project — in the same way that I lived in Indonesia, and I speak fluent Indonesian, and then I left and came back to the United States in order to write my book The Gay Archipelago and my second book as well. In order to do the kind of work that I do, the fieldwork has to stop so that you can write and think and go back and forth in that way. And a wonderful thing about digital ethnography is that I can come back for a couple of hours to check in, in a way that in Indonesia I would go back once a year, every other year, and it was a lot more of a commitment. So I actually can stay in touch better here, in the sense that it’s not just Facebook or whatever. I can actually come into Second Life and see people. Just today I was talking to Gentle Heron with Virtual Ability, and I’m probably going to be participating in their big annual event in December, which will be really fun. So it is a nice thing about digital ethnography that you can stay in touch, in most cases, with the communities that you’re working with, and it’s not all or nothing. Even talking to you now — we could have done other things, but since we’re talking about Second Life, it’s fun to do it here.

But when I’m advising students or other people who are doing this kind of work, it cuts both ways, in the sense that to really think and write, you need some space. You know about that as well as I do. And it’s a temptation, having the virtual world so close and accessible, to say, “Oh, I’ll do one more interview. I’ll do a few more things.” In a way, it was sad when I would leave Indonesia after spending months or a year there, but it was also a blessing in disguise, in the sense that it gave me the time and space to write. I love how easy it is to come into Second Life, but if you want to do a film or a book or an article or a blog post or whatever, you have to create your own boundaries in order to do that. At least for me and most people I know. I don’t know if you find this when you write about something; it’s hard to do.

Ryan: I just wanted to say that I can completely relate to this. I’m on a 12-month, full-salary research and study leave where I’m writing this open educational resource on the metaverse. And I have found that I’m having to be a lot more disciplined about not spending time in places like Second Life. I need to put on a different hat when I am the researcher and the writer, as opposed to the person who loves Second Life.

Tom: That’s exactly what I’m talking about.

…

Ryan: Looking back, are there any parts of your 2008 book, Coming of Age in Second Life, that you would want to revise today?

Tom No, not really. Like you said, even when I did the second edition, I did a new preface talking about changes in Second Life and other kinds of things, but I didn’t really change a word of the main text. And it’s like that with my Indonesia work as well. When you do research, you put everything into it, you do the best you can. And it is about a certain time and place, a certain context, and also about a certain focus — what it is that you decide to do. And I’m very happy with that. As you said, I later did the disability project with Donna Davis. When I did my first Second Life book, Coming of Age in Second Life, I really decided I wanted to do an overview of this emerging world, of virtual worlds, and that I wasn’t going to focus on disability. In my Indonesia work, I focused on gay Indonesians and sexuality. Here, I wanted to try looking at an overview of what was going on in the world, and I wouldn’t want to revise that now. Someone else could have done beautiful, brilliant research focusing on a topic like disability or identity or gender, versus the kind of overview I did. But that was my goal, and I met that goal, so I don’t think there’s anything I would revise.

It’s more that, for instance, when I did that Second Life book, I got to know some folks in disability communities, people like Sojourner and Gentle [Heron] and others, and I just became really fascinated by that and was learning so much. I wrote about it a little bit in the book, but I told myself, “If I am able to do a second project someday in Second Life, this disability stuff would be a great thing to really focus on in more depth.” And that’s what I was so fortunate to be able to do. That’s always been my experience. So, no regrets, because I did the thing I set out to do, and that’s what it is. And if there are other things you run into, those can be future things to do. There’s so much amazing stuff happening in Second Life.

…

Ryan: Your method when you did your fieldwork was to stay entirely in-world as Tom Bukowski, your avatar, and talk to as many different avatars as you possibly could. And one of the changes that has taken place in Second Life since 2007 is that so much of resident life has poured into places like Discord. For example, I have an associated Discord server for the RyanSchultz.com blog with over 700 members representing different metaverse platforms. And also Flickr, and more recently the new social media platform Primfeed, which is just popping off. If you were to start over again, would you have to expand the fieldsite to include these external — not really platforms, but the Discords and the Flickr and Primfeed? Would that have changed how you approached your anthropological study?

Tom: That’s a great question. And those are platforms. There are two questions in what you asked. The first is the issue of meeting people in the physical world when you do this kind of research, and that depends on the project. For instance, we did that quite a bit for the disability project. We met several people in the physical world, and they were even in the film. But one thing that you obviously see — and this is not unique to Second Life; you see this with Discord, with LinkedIn, with Instagram, whatever — is that you have a lot of virtual communities where the people involved never meet in the physical world, or 99% of them never do. Most people on a LinkedIn network aren’t meeting each other in the physical world. Most people playing League of Legends aren’t meeting in the physical world. It would miss the point, and be an incorrect perspective, to say the research could only be legitimate if you met people in the physical world when they aren’t meeting, right? You’re following the people in that sense. So that’s one reason it was very effective, in my research, to talk to people only inside of Second Life, because they were all over the world — all over the US, North America, Canada — and they were not meeting in the physical world. A few were, but the majority were not. It was not necessary for the online culture to be happening. So there’s that piece.

Then the other piece you looked at: I’d have to look at my book to get the section, but there is in Coming of Age in Second Life a whole section called “Beyond the Platform,” talking about people using Facebook, but also World of Warcraft or other kinds of online spaces. One thing I talk about there is — it still happens nowadays, but especially back then — sometimes all of Second Life would crash, or big parts of it. And people would go meet in World of Warcraft or on Facebook or whatever. It was like a virtual virtual world, a virtual Second Life: “While Second Life is down, hey, let’s all go over here.” So I actually have that section. It’s in chapter five or six, I forget now.

Ryan: Actually, now that you mention it, I remember when I was still on Facebook — and I gave up on traditional social media about five or six years ago — we would go on there when Second Life went down and say, “Is it up yet? Is it up yet?” And you’re right, I had completely forgotten about that.

Tom: That’s right. So I talk about that in the Second Life book. And nowadays that is so common with any virtual world. But would I do it now? It really depends on what your research questions are. There could be a research project where you’re interested in how people are using Linden Homes and the online world of the homes in order to create community. You could imagine a project, even now in 2026, where you wouldn’t look at Discord, you wouldn’t look at the other things. But if the people you’re looking at are actually using those things, then you absolutely would.

One concept that I created with my co-author for the Intellivision book, of all places — that historical book — was “transplatform.” We looked at how, going back to the 1980s, people were moving between and using multiple platforms. And a lot of Second Life sociality is transplatform sociality, in the sense that people are either using other virtual worlds or they’re using Primfeed, Discord, all those kinds of things. Even in my 2008 book, I have a transplatform kind of analysis, and in the disability project we were looking at transplatform too. I would say nowadays most research questions you would probably look at with regard to Second Life would involve the transplatform, but I wouldn’t want to say for sure. Even then, 20 years ago, one thing I was looking at in that respect is that creators in Second Life were using Adobe Illustrator or other programs to create textures and things. So even then it was a transplatform kind of thing — and this is before mesh. Nowadays Blender, Maya, those kinds of things are getting used. There’s the Second Life Marketplace, which didn’t exist before.

But just to be clear, you could imagine a research project where you’re really looking at something that is only showing up in-world. I would suspect, though, that nowadays most research questions involving Second Life would, in some way, shape or form, have a transplatform aspect. But once again, the research question is really crucial, because if you’re not careful you’re going to bite off more than you can chew. You’re going to end up with something so big that it’s not feasible. Having focus in doing research is a huge secret to success.

…

Ryan: You talked about mesh, and that is a question I have on my list as well. Obviously, while you were doing your fieldwork it was all prim building — sometimes collaborative, but all in-world. And of course from 2011 on, we had the advent of mesh and the use of external 3D tools such as Blender or one of the Adobe products, and then importing mesh objects into the world. And the latest wrinkle, of course, is using generative AI to create mesh content and then importing that. You talk in your book about techne. Do you think the advent of mesh, and the use of generative AI to create mesh, has changed techne from when it used to be just prim building in-world?

Tom: That’s a great question. Between prim building in-world and mesh, I remember sculpties, right?

Ryan: I remember sculpties, too.

Tom: Yeah, there were sculpties, and now there’s mesh and all that.

Ryan: Okay, good.

Tom: That’s what I say. But I don’t think it’s about techne as such so much. Thinking back to the original Greek notion of techne: a fish can breathe under water, a human cannot breathe underwater, but if I hold a straw, I can be under the water and breathe through the straw. And the Greeks would have called that straw techne, right? So techne is something that extends the human. It originally means something like art or craft, and it goes back to the myth of fire, with Prometheus, for instance. So techne is an art or craft that extends the ability of the human. And that could happen with prims in-world, or with sculpties or mesh made outside the world, with or without generative AI.

To me, the interesting question about all of that has to do with the cultural norms, the online cultural things that happen when it becomes very transplatform, like you’re saying, and people are building off-world. Roblox, for instance, has a separate program called Roblox Studio, so you don’t actually build in-world. You can build collaboratively in Roblox Studio, sort of, but you just appear as a name tag when you’re in Studio. It’s very interesting, weird. And then you bake it, so to speak — you render it — and then everyone can go into the actual Roblox and see what you’ve built.

…When Second Life got going — and people often forget about this — one of the most interesting things people were talking about, that I was interested in as well, was user-generated content. Cory Ondrejka, who helped found Second Life, had a famous article about escaping the gilded cage. And there was a way in which Second Life was being seen as very similar to things like Facebook or Twitter, because it was user-generated content. Mark Zuckerberg was not making the Facebook posts. I was, my mother was, my friends were making the posts. It was user-generated content. And the Lindens were not making most of the buildings and prims in Second Life; users were making stuff.

…And what’s interesting in Second Life — and this very much links up to Blender and mesh, like you’re saying — is that we’re seeing a class of people who are content creators, who are making furniture, who are making textures, and then people buy those things. There are fewer people making their own things. In the old days, in my original Second Life house, I made every chair, I made every stool, everything, out of prims. And I still love building with prims. These chairs we’re sitting on right now are beautiful, but I have a feeling you did not make them.

Ryan: I did not make anything in this house.

Tom: Exactly. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m just saying it’s an interesting thing: in virtual worlds, just like in social media, we’re seeing an early attempt at a kind of egalitarian, user-created economy, where everyone is…earning lots of money. They’re creating, and others ask, “Where is the sofa going to go that I got on the Marketplace?” And once again, I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing. I’m just saying it’s an interesting thing, and it’s something I’ve written about a bit but should really write about more. There was a period, from about 2005 to 2015, where there was a real attempt in new platforms — from virtual worlds like Second Life to social media — to have a sort of egalitarian creating, and that broke down. That has really also happened in Roblox, for instance, where there’s a group of people who are creating almost all of the well-known experiences, even though anyone can download Roblox Studio and make a world. I’ve played around with it; anyone can do it, but most don’t. And in the same way, anyone in Second Life can build all of their own stuff in their home if they want. In the old days, we did. That is much rarer now. Once again, not a bad thing, but definitely an interesting thing.

And one thing I’m always interested in in my research is that some things about the internet, or about online sociality, are very specific. They’re only about Second Life, or only about TikTok. They’re very unique, and that’s interesting. But then there are some things that are widespread, that are transplatform, that show up in multiple locations. And this issue we’re talking about here [a relatively small number of people creating items for use by the masses] is not unique to Second Life. It’s showing up in other virtual worlds like Roblox or Minecraft, and it’s definitely also showing up in social media.

Ryan: Okay, that’s really interesting. I’d like to switch gears here. As you know, we are conducting this interview in voice. You should know that I don’t actually use voice a lot in Second Life, and there are many reasons for that…My main avatar is actually a female avatar called Vanity Fair, and one of the reasons I don’t use voice is because it would destroy the illusion. I call Vanity my drag queen. So, anyway, about voice. During the time you did your field research, there was a great discussion about how voice would impact Second Life. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about text versus voice in Second Life. My experience has been that most of the time, people are still using text, and voice is rare but not unheard of. I’d like you to talk a bit about the advent of voice and how you think it has impacted Second Life.

Tom: So yes, when I started my Second Life research, there was no voice yet in-world. And things like Discord for doing voice on the side…were actually fairly difficult. So most interaction was text, and voice got introduced during my fieldwork. It was very controversial, for multiple reasons, and it’s been interesting what’s happened since…

Anyway, there was interesting stuff around disability, because deaf folks were very concerned about being excluded by voice. People with visual impairments, who were blind, very much wanted voice. Or some folks with Parkinson’s or other things where hand movement is difficult really wanted voice. Second Life has always been very global, and there are a lot of people who can read and type English but have trouble speaking it or understanding it when it’s spoken. So there was a lot of international concern about voice and so on.

It was introduced — not all virtual worlds have it — and it’s been interesting. It’s exactly what you say: it’s used, but not that often. Partially that’s because, like you said, it may reveal things about your physical-world identity that people don’t want to reveal. There are the voice sliders and modifiers, but they’re fairly clunky, or people don’t necessarily like to use them that much. Text allows for all kinds of multitasking. You aren’t making a problem when there’s music being played or a performance: you can type away and say “wonderful song,” whereas if you shout that in voice, people are going to ask you to be quiet for talking during a music performance. And there are a lot of social situations where you might have 10 people around, and if you type, you can [keep] track who is saying what.

…That’s another issue around voice: voice is more vulnerable to lag than typing is. If there’s a slight delay in the typing, people don’t really notice or mind, and it takes up a lot less bandwidth. So there you have it.

Ryan: So when the pandemic happened — I know, based on figures that Linden Lab gave, that their published monthly active users of about 600,000 went up to about 900,000 MAU during the pandemic. So there was a bit of a bump in usage, but it went back down again, obviously. Do you think that the pandemic made any lasting changes in the culture of Second Life?

Tom: Oh gosh. That’s hard to say. I’m not sure I have a good answer for that. But what I will say is, I think there’s still so much potential and missed opportunity in Second Life for things like holding conferences, or education. One thing that has been very unfortunate is that when COVID happened, we all had to adapt very quickly, and it was rough. We were thrown into the deep end of the pool, going into Zoom and all these other spaces. At least at my university, and most universities that I know of, they only had technical support for Zoom or websites. There was no help for things like Second Life. So I taught some classes using Second Life, but it was challenging, because I had to do all of the onboarding and training and showing.

Ryan: I can relate to that completely, because I had to do that for a class at my university. It was a graduate student course on virtual world design, and I had to really work to pull together a package to get them up the learning curve for a class that we had in Second Life.

Tom: Yeah. Exactly. And it’s unfortunate that when COVID passed — which is wonderful; we were all so excited to take off our masks and meet physically, and I totally agree with that — there was sometimes a sense of, “Oh, finally, we can stop using everything online.” Think about things like climate change, and people getting on airplanes to fly to a conference that you could do in Second Life and have it be totally effective and fun. I can’t believe that online conferences — I’m about to participate in one for the American Anthropological Association, and it’s all on Zoom. And I’ve seen what the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education folks do here when they hold conferences: you have a place to speak, they also have a café, they have an art gallery. They really do a great job.

Ryan: I gave a presentation there in the spring.

Tom: When you go to a physical-world conference, if all you had was the meeting sessions, you would be bored to death, and you would miss out on networking and a lot of the fun. I can’t believe that virtual conferences nowadays are still all using Zoom.

So I do think we threw out the baby with the bathwater, or whatever the right metaphor is. There is a lot of potential in virtual worlds for education, conferences, all kinds of things. It doesn’t have to be that we put on the VR gear, and it doesn’t have to be The Matrix, right? Just like what we’re doing right now. And I do think that people’s relief at getting away from the lockdown, which I totally get, has meant some missed opportunities that I hope we will come back to, with more experimenting and support.

Virtual worlds have incredible potential for global connection and all kinds of things, where you aren’t setting the bar at the tech-industry idea that everyone has to do it all day long or it’s not worth supporting. This can be a very useful thing, and it doesn’t have to be the next iPhone. It doesn’t have to take over the entire world. That’s one reason why the metaverse stuff has gone so unfortunately, now that everything is about AI. Like you said, Second Life is now back to, let’s say, 500,000 or 600,000 monthly active users. There are anthropologists who spend their entire career studying an island society or a village of 5,000 people. Not everything has to be gigantic to be interesting and valuable.

Ryan: Good point. Excellent point.

…

Ryan: Okay, I have one final question, and then we can just throw it wide open. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the educational social VR platform ENGAGE shut down at the end of October. It’s going to throw a monkey wrench into a number of different initiatives. And this has been a bad year for the metaverse in general: Rec Room shut down. The term I am using for this period of contraction, closures and consolidations is “metaverse winter.” We are going through a metaverse winter. So my last question for you, Tom, is: why do you think Second Life has endured, when so many virtual worlds and social VR platforms that came up at the same time as Second Life — like There.com or The Sims Online — or came up later, have not survived? Second Life is still burbling along at 23 and a half years old.

Tom: Well, that’s also a great question. I don’t have a perfect answer. I could only guess.

Ryan: That’s fine.

Tom: Part of it may be that Second Life is so open-ended that you can do almost anything in it, and so it’s allowed a whole range of different communities to form and do things. That flexibility of the platform has been part of it, I think. But There.com was also very flexible, so it’s really hard to say. The ability of the avatars to be very customizable — that’s really valuable to a lot of people — but also the ability of land to be very customizable. It’s so open-ended, and that struck me from the very beginning, compared to something like The Sims Online.

There’s often confusion about virtual worlds and online games, because a virtual world doesn’t have to be game-oriented. Second Life is a great example: there are games in Second Life, but you can also use it for a business meeting, or for meeting a romantic partner, or staying in touch with your friends or your family. Maybe it’s that flexibility, but it’s a really great question — what has allowed it to survive, and frankly do so well and have such amazing content for so long. I really wish I knew the answer to that. I would just say, since this is the last question, as a final thought: there is often an obsession with the new in the technology world, which is linked to making money — the new iPhone, the new one that folds in half, whatever. People often ask me, when they hear about my research, “Oh, is Second Life still around?”

Ryan: Exactly. Everybody thinks Second Life is quaint and outdated, or if they’ve heard of it, it’s only about the pervert side. You tell people that you’re active in Second Life and they kind of look at you funny. They don’t realize what a vast, blank creative canvas it is. And one of the things I’m writing about in my book is that I believe it was launched at a particularly fortuitous time, before Facebook and other social media platforms launched, before smartphones launched. There was a window of opportunity. And I think the decision by Cory Ondrejka — the one who said, “We are going to have user-generated content, and you own it”: I think that was a key decision. But I think it’s partly just luck that they’ve survived as long as they have.

Tom: I think all that makes sense. But also, just in terms of the time and the obsession with the new: when you and I were setting up this time to meet, we used email, and email has been around for 20 years longer than Second Life. No one asks, “Is email still around?”

Ryan: Exactly. Right.

Tom: And no one asks — like you said, you do a blog. Blogs go back to the early ’90s. Not all technology is changing as much as people think it is. Email is different now than it used to be, but a lot of it, frankly, is the same. And even blogs, that technology is largely the same. So I think it was a sweet spot.

Like you’re saying, there was some luck and good decisions. But also, so much of the internet is continuing under our noses, and people don’t even notice it because the focus is so often on the new. Like I said, we set up this meeting through email, which has been around since the 1980s.

So in order to understand what’s changing, we need to understand the continuity as well. When we don’t think about the continuity, there’s a real danger that we won’t understand the change.

…

Ryan:Thank you so much for being so generous with your time…I will follow up if I have any questions. But this has been great.

Tom: It’s really wonderful to talk with someone like you who just has so much knowledge about Second Life and experience here. It’s really fun. I really enjoyed it a lot. Thank you so much.

Still Here, Still Burbling Along…

I am having a pretty horrible week, between receiving more bad news from a doctor about my continuing neck and shoulder pain, and stupidly getting myself into a single-vehicle car accident that has left me with a very badly dented rear bumper. But yes, despite these problems, I am still working on my OER textbook about the metaverse. Here’s a sample of chapter two, which is all about Second Life:

Here’s the text, in case you don’t want to squint at the screen capture above:

In many ways, this chapter is both the easiest and the hardest one to write for this entire book. It is the easiest to write, because of the nearly two decades of experience I have had in Second Life since I first set foot in the platform in March 2007. In that time, I have created and embodied a small army of avatars (as I mentioned in the Preface), built and furnished homes, explored other people’s creations, made friends and acquaintances from around the world, took part in fantasy and historical roleplay, and attended countless events, ranging from conferences to concerts. However, that same lived experience makes it harder for me to write about Second Life, because it makes it more difficult to step outside of my biases toward this virtual world, and look at SL from a detached, critical perspective.

What most casual observers don’t understand about Second Life, which has now been operating for over 23 years, is that it still exists, and that is still is a very profitable endeavour for Linden Lab, the company founded in 1999 by Philip Rosedale. Wagner James Au, in his book The Making of Second Life, writes memorably about those humble first days:

“Building the metaverse wasn’t even the company’s main goal when it began operations in 1999, in a warehouse on Linden Street, a narrow alley in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley. Like many parts of the city during the Internet’s first boom times, the street teetered between gentrification and drug-addled squalor. On one end of Linden were upscale restaurants serving the arrogant young mandarins of dot-com excess; on the other was an unattended parking lot with a clientele who often slept in their cars. Linden Lab’s immediate neighbors were wholly appropriate for the world that would eventually emerge from their servers: a dubiously grungy auto body garage and a fetish boutique.” (Au, 2008 p. 13)

I will probably continue to drop bits and pieces as I continue to write. Obviously, I won’t be posting to this blog as often as I used to, which is understandable. I just wanted to let you know that I’m still here.

P.S. Yes, I found and fixed the small typo in the screen capture, in the transcribed text!

P.P.S. Oops, wrong page number in my citation! Corrected.

PART TWO OF TWO: I Review Anthropoligist Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life

NOTE: Have you read part one of this two-part series? I review two other 2008 books about Second Life here, and talk about how well they’ve held up since publication:

PART ONE OF TWO: I Review Two 2008 Books About Second Life—What’s Changed in 18 Years? What’s Stayed the Same?

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of age in Second Life : an anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton University Press.

As I mentioned in my previous blogpost, Tom Boellstorff, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, wrote this academic book in 2008, after conducting an anthropological study of Second Life and its residents. The time period of Tom’s anthropological fieldwork, which forms the basis of this book, ran from June 3rd, 2004 to January 20th, 2007 (p. 7), a period he refers to as the “coming of age” of Second Life as a virtual world, when it grew from 5,000 to ten million resident accounts (p. 83).

Boellstorff stated his goals for this academic monograph as follows (p. 24):

One goal of this book is substantive: to provide an ethnographic portrait of Second Life. Another is methodological: to demonstrate the potential of ethnography for studying virtual worlds. A third goal is theoretical: to contribute toward a better understanding of virtual worlds in all their constantly transforming complexity.

While I do seem to remember that I had, some time in the past, dipped my nose here and there into sections of Tom’s book, I had not really had an opportunity to read through the entire work until this week (thank you to my university for approving my research and study leave!). So here is my review of Tom’s book, along with some quotes which I quite liked.

This is a structured, nine-chapter academic work, which Tom recommends you read in order as he builds his arguments. The book includes a glossary, a notes section, an extensive bibliography, and a professionally-compiled index—all features which were greatly appreciated by this librarian!

Sticky notes galore in my university library’s copy of Tom’s book!

There’s so many great insights that I sticky-noted, but I’m going to start off with a quote from his final chapter, The Virtual (p. 217):

Culture in virtual worlds may be monumental in its own way, but as speaking did not disappear with the emergence of text, so the actual world will not become irrelevant as it becomes possible to live parts of our lives online. At hand is not a Virtual Age that sweeps the actual aside, but an Age of Techne in which there is continuity and change. There is continuity because humans are virtual whenever they engage in techne: “the virtual is essential to the real” (Poster 2001:127). The story of Prometheus describes one mythic moment when humans, receiving the gift of techne, became fully human for the first time. Since humans are always crafting themselves through culture, they have always been virtual (Clark 2003). The virtual is the anthropological [emphasis Boellstorff’s]. This makes it possible to study virtual worlds with the same flexible, underdetermined ethnographic tools used to study human cultures in the actual world.

The Age of Techne is a theme throughout this book, the term Boellstorff uses to describe the technology of the current information age is which we live (p. 21). Later, on p. 38, he states:

In this discussion and throughout this book, I might be seen to be trying to have it both ways; I claim that notions of the virtual and of techne are in one sense as old as humanity, and in another sense I claim that something very new is happening in virtual worlds. This is intentional. It is crucial to keep in mind the history shaping the present moment, while also identifying how that present moment is not reducible to its history. What makes virtual worlds different from all hitherto existing forms of virtuality is that techne can take place inside them [emphasis Boellstorff’s], rather than solely in the actual world to produce them: “where most tools produce effects on a wider world of which they are only a part, the computer contains its own [virtual] worlds in miniature” (Edwards 1990:109). Techne makes wood and ideas into a newspaper, but techne not only makes silicon and ideas into a virtual world; techne can take place within that created world itself. In virtual worlds, techne produces a gap between actual and virtual in the realm of the virtual [emphasis Boellstorff’s]. Swallowing their own ontological tails, virtual worlds for the first time allow techne to become recursive, providing humans with radically new ways to understand their lives as beings of culture as well as physical embodiment.

As you can see from these two excerpts, Boellstorff is writing for an academic audience, so it might be a tough slog for those of you who are more used to reading mass-market works written for the general public, but it’s well worth unpacking his ideas! Virtual worlds created by techne (i.e, the act of software programming), can in themselves become arenas for techne (i.e creating a house in Second Life)! Indeed,this has been one of the primary reasons for the initial and continued success of Second Life: its ability to be a blank, three-dimensional canvas for people to be creative, and build anything they can imagine.

On page 25, Tom writes:

Drawing upon the work of a range of scholars of technology and society, I will develop a theory of this virtual worldview as techne, and of the person who engages in techne not just as homo faber (“man the maker”) or homo ludens (“man the player”), but above all as homo cyber. The human online, the virtual human. In using the term “techne,” I will draw upon a philosophical distinction between knowledge (episteme) and technology or art (techne), examining how virtual selfhood is becoming predicated on the idea that people can craft their lifeworlds through intentional creativity.

On page 29, he makes a clear distinction is his defnition of homo cyber, arguing that virtual worlds make us more human rather than post-human:

While some see virtual worlds as marking the emergence of the posthuman, through terms like homo cyber I argue that the forms of selfhood and sociality characterizing virtual worlds are profoundly human. But while the emergence of virtual worlds “does not necessarily mean the end of the human . . . we need to see the human as re-configured and organized differently” (Nayar 2004:21). This is one meaning of the phrase “virtually human”—in virtual worlds, we are not quite human. The relationship between the virtual and the human is not a “post” relationship where one term displaces another; it is a relationship of coconstitution. Far from it being the case that virtual worlds herald the emergence of the posthuman, in this book I argue that it is in being virtual that we are human [emphasis Boellstorff’s].

Another theme that runs throughout the book is that of creationist capitalism, described by Boellstorff as “a mode of capitalism in which labour is understood in terms of creativity, so that production is understood as creation.” (p. 206). He goes on to write (pp. 207-208):

Creationist capitalism draws structuring principles from the individualistic ethos of contemporary capitalism—specifically its Silicon Valley variant, which can be termed the “Californian Ideology” (Barbrook and Cameron 2001; see also Turner 2006). Given that Linden Lab was based in California and its CEO, Philip Rosedale, grew up in San Diego, it is not surprising that Second Life was particularly shaped by assumptions of this ideology, which “has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the high-tech industries of Silicon Valley. . . . [T]he Californian ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies” (Barbrook and Cameron 2001:364).

This ideology, by no means limited to California, is an economic model of “prosumption” where capitalist subjects produce what they consume, turning consumption into a form of production (Toffler 1980).

And again, another reason for Second Life’s longevity (and profitability!) is its ability to allow residents (who are themselves consumers) to create and sell goods and services to other residents. For example, an SL user can purchase textures from an in-world store, apply them to furniture she creates, and then vend that chair or table to another user. Linden Lab’s November 2003 decision to give creators the intellectual property rights to their creations (p. 214) was a key decision to enable the explosion of creationist capitalism across the grid. (I particularly loved Tom’s quoting of “the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies;” to me, this description perfectly encapsulates Second Life’s ethos!)

Now, I am going to jump around a bit within the book, talking about other sections I enjoyed. For example, on page 102 I was amused when Tom compared SL residents complaining about lag being equivalent to real-life people complaining about the weather. Accurate! In a further discussion of the concept of lag, I came across the following, highly interesting fact (p. 103):

In the context of Second Life, lag originated in the truly immense amount of information represented by its land, the objects on that land, and the avatars inhabiting that land. By early 2007 there was by one estimate about one petabyte (a million gigabytes) of data in Second Life. At that point, were all of the books in the Library of Congress digitized (about 30 million volumes), it would have been equivalent to only about 2 percent of the data stored inside Second Life.

I would dearly love to see this assertion updated with current statistics for both Second Life and the Library of Congress, to see how it has changed over time! Alas, I do not have the time to do this research myself (I have my hands full as it is!).

There’s also a lengthy discussion of the AFK (Away From Keyboard) phenomenon in Second Life and its various meanings (pp. 106-112), ending with the following section:

Residents sometimes explicitly scheduled mundane actual-world activities like laundry to coincide with events in Second Life, so that they could run back and forth to the washing machine: as one resident emphasized, “AFK works so well because people do not know what we are doing [in the actual world].” Residents sometimes said they wished they could “go AFK” in the actual world to escape uncomfortable situations, but knew this was not possible: “no one ever says ‘AFK’ in real life.” Such conscious uses of AFK reflect the consequentiality and durability of the virtual/actual binarism: the boundary between virtual and actual is constituted and reinforced by movements between them. Like lag, AFK reveals how virtual worlds are places in their own right, temporally linked to the actual world but constantly at risk of falling out of synch. Indeed what I term the “AFK test” provides one of the clearest means for identifying virtual worlds: if you can go “AFK” from something, that something is a virtual world. [Emphasis mine].

I also appreciated Tom’s discussion of the use of the word avatar to describe Second Life users, as well as his discussion of alts (alternate avatars) on pp. 128-134. Here’s a sample quote from page 128:

Throughout this book I have been referring to the virtual embodiments of persons as avatars, a term used in many online worlds. This Sanskrit word originally referred to the incarnation of a Hindu god (particularly Vishnu). With reference to cybersociality, the term was probably first used in the virtual worlds Habitat and Ultima IV in the mid-1980s, as well as in Neal Stephenson’s 1993 science fiction novel Snow Crash (Morningstar and Farmer 1991; Stephenson 1993:470). While “avatar” (“avie” or “av” for short) historically referred to incarnation—a movement from virtual to actual—with respect to online worlds it connotes the opposite movement from actual to virtual, a decarnation or invirtualization.

Among other topics, Boellstorff discusses the popularity of Second Life among various communities, such as the furries, queer people, and those with autistim and/or ADHD. I’m not going to quote the sections, because this blogpost is already reaching War and Peace length; I would advise you to obtain your own copy of Tom Boellstorff’s book, and read it yourself!

Even as a almost-nineteen year resident of Second Life (in one avatar or another), I gained some excellent insights from reading this book, and I can recommend it highly. It provides a valuable snapshot of a crucial time period in SL’s history, and Tom Boellstorff’s commentary on Second Life, and its cultures and idiosyncrasies, has stood up very well in the 18 years since this academic monograph was published.

P.S. To my surprise and delight, Tom Boellstorff was kind enough to comment on my first blog post of this two-part series, offering to meet up in Second Life and answer any questions I had. So you might soon see a follow-up blogpost, with a Q&A session with the author himself! It’s great to hear Tom is still active in Second Life.

P.P.S. I also did write up a blogpost about another of Boellstorff’s research projects here, as well as another blogpost about moving his Digital Cultures course into Second Life during the pandemic.

Dr. Tom Boellstorff. Photo credit: Steve Zylius/UCI

PART ONE OF TWO: I Review Two 2008 Books About Second Life—What’s Changed in 18 Years? What’s Stayed the Same?

I am still working away—slowly—on the first two chapters of my OER textbook about the metaverse. Today, in an effort to motivate this librarian to do some (gasp!) actual dead-tree book reading as part of my research for chapter 2, which is all about Second Life, I have decided to make it more fun by simultaneously writing a blogpost review of three books while I (re)read them. I get to kill two birds with one stone: I move forward in my research while taking notes for my own book, and you, my faithful blog readers, get some content. (Also I also get to rest my sore neck and shoulder joints and muscles by NOT sitting in front of a desktop computer all day.)

The three books, all published in the same year, 2008, are:

  • Au, W. (2008). The making Of Second Life: notes from the New World. HarperCollins.
  • Bell, L., & Trueman, R. B. (2008). Virtual worlds, real libraries : librarians and educators in Second Life and other multi-user virtual environments (1st ed.). Information Today.
  • Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of age in Second Life : an anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton University Press. (Please see the note at the end of this blogpost; my review of Tom Boellstorff’s book is here.)

Virtual Worlds, Real Libraries: Librarians and Educators in Second Life and Other Multi-User Virtual Environments

Lori Bell (a librarian with the Alliance Library System in Illinois) and Rhonda B. Trueman (an acquisitions and access services librarian at Northwest Florida State College) were both highly active in the collective work of setting up and running libraries in Second Life, circa 2007-2009 (my first years in Second Life). They are the co-editors of this 21-chapter book, with contributions from 26 authors.

Note: the website cited in this book appears to have shut down, but the Community Virtual Library project still has a website, which is regularly updated (for example, from it I learned that one of the editors of this book, Lori Bell, passed away earlier this year; I actually found several different dates for her death, but I am going to assume that the February 10th, 2026 date in this heartfelt tribute is the correct one).

This book referred to virtual worlds as MUVEs (Multi-User Virtual Environments), perhaps to carry on the tradition of using MU* acronyms to refer to previous, text-based virtual worlds (MUDs, MUSHes, etc.). MUVE proved to be a unpopular term, and as far as I am aware, it did not catch on.

A passage from the introduction (by Bell & Trueman) struck me:

Libraries need to look at places on the web, including virtual worlds, where potential library users are active and assess how library services might be integrated into these environments. Many individuals now involved in virtual worlds may not be traditional library users. By putting ourselves where these users are, librarians have a remarkable opportunity to increase use of the brick-and-mortar library, promote library services and materials, and support education initiatives in SL and other virtual worlds.

Some see libraries in virtual worlds as representing a “third type” of library presence, in addition to traditional brick-and-mortar institutions and virtual interactions conducted via chat or email. Virtual worlds are the new frontier; they offer librarians the exciting opportunity to serve as leaders in shaping these environments and influencing their use in education, business, and day-to-day life. Believe it or not, virtual world libraries are also an excellent way to promote traditional library services through book discussions, author programs, and displays that inspire reading.

Collaboration is another important reason for libraries to be in virtual worlds. Using SL, in particular, many of the librarians you will meet and read about in Virtual Worlds, Real Libraries have engaged with individuals from all corners of the globe. They have discovered opportunities to collaborate on projects with nonprofits, corporations, and educational groups; these projects would have been difficult, if not impossible, to coordinate in the real world.

While I do agree that Second Life can provide opportunities for collaboration, I would still argue that SL, still, has too steep an entry learning curve as opposed to, say, using a Discord server, or the iPhone in your pocket. But the dream of using Second Life to reach new users, or create a new “third space,” never materialized.

In chapter one of this book, Tom Peters lists a series of questions about these volunteer librarians’ early (circa 2006-2008) work in Second Life:

  • Do avatars even want and need library services in SL?
  • If so, what types of services and collections do they want and need?
  • Would one library serve all avatars, or should there be different types of libraries, as in the real world?
  • How can we create links and bridges between existing, real world library collections and services (print and digital) and the collections and services being built in SL?
  • How can or should librarianship in SL be structured and managed?
  • How can or should it be governed?
  • How can or should it be funded?

Now, 18 years later, I think that we can probably answer these questions. From my own experience and perspective, the people who used Second Life were, by and large, not looking for library services, and did not make use of them when they were offered. And again, asking potential library users to spend an hour getting up to speed as an avatar in Second Life, just to ask a reference question or attend an event, was probably too much to ask. The Community Virtual Library (CVL; one of the few virtual libraries still operating on the grid; SLURL) is beautiful, but often deserted when I come to visit. However, there are some exceptions to this, such as Virtual Ability (SLURL) continuing the pioneering work of HealthInfo Island to this day. And both CVL and Virtual Ability continue to host regular events as well.

But, by and large, the answer to the first question Tom poses is no, the overwhelming majority of avatars don’t need or use library services in SL. It didn’t seem to matter what kinds of services were offered; aside from novelty and curiosity, the users weren’t there. Stymied by the copyright restrictions of traditional publishing, the “links and bridges” Tom mentions between real-world collections and services were difficult or impossible to implement, leaving most SL libraries restricted to copyright-free works. Another big problem was the fact that this 2006-era initiative was volunteer-driven, and the inevitable volunteer burnout, combined with the 2008 economic downturn, led to many of the libraries mentioned in this book shutting down their services after a couple of years (a notable exception being the San Jose State University’s iSchool, which still maintains a region; here’s a SLURL if you wish to explore the sim and its many exhibits, such as its Banned Books area).

In chapter 5, Rhonda Trueman discusses some of the problems librarians encountered while working in the InfoIsland regions:

There are three temptations, though, that can derail the best of intentions. One temptation is to become immersed in this environment to the detriment of real world activities; another is to focus only on a set task or goal as a volunteer and be blinded to the creativity and innovation that abound in this environment; and yet another is to put so much time into virtual volunteer activities—while still trying to balance a real life job and a family—that one becomes burned out. Although most of our librarians in Alliance Virtual Library are volunteers, many also have a library on Cybrary City 1 or 2 that represents the real life library for which they work. Many of these librarians donate their own personal time to building a virtual library presence, but others are assigned and paid for this role as a portion of their daily work. Difficulty in managing real world work activities combined with SL work activities, neglecting real world responsibilities, and burnout are the reasons volunteers who decide not to continue in Alliance Virtual Library cite most often.

And, as someone who did spend a little bit of time volunteering to man the reference desk at InfoIsland, I could relate mostly to the first temptation Rhonda lists, rather than the other two! And yes, I could see that trying to juggle this new thing, on top of all the regular responsibilites of librarianship, would lead to burnout! I myself left because I found myself spending more and more time on activities outside of librarianship in Second Life.

Overall, it’s rather sad to see how much the initial burst of enthusiasm of that time period (2006-2009) has faded to a faint echo today. By and large, libraries and librarians pretty much decided to abandon Second Life fairly early on its history (along with most other real-world entities such as corporations, who had experienced a similar boom, disillusion, and retreat). I discuss this is more detail in a 2018 blogpost, here: The Rise and Fall of Library Use of Second Life: What Happened to All the Libraries That Used to Be in Second Life and Other Virtual Worlds?

The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World

Wagner James Au, of course, is the ur-reporter on Second Life, and someone who has been participating in (and commenting on) Second Life for a long time. Wagner joined Linden Lab as an in-house chronicler of their work on Second Life (based on a recommendation made by Howard Rheingold when he was given an early demo). Au joined SL in April of 2003, when the platform was still in beta test, with only a few thousand users. And, 23 years later, he is still writing about Second Life!

His long-running blog, New World Notes, has now been archived*, but he has since made the move to Patreon, where he continues to post. Notably, he announced on Sept. 3rd, 2026, that he is “now contracting for Linden Lab on external media outreach and bizdev” as a “part-time, trial run experiment.”

While Bell and Trueman’s book was written by and for librarians and educators, Wagner James Au’s work was a mass-market book aimed at the general public who might or might not have heard something about Second Life by the time it was published in 2008. (To provide a bit of context, I had joined SL in March of 2007, merrily creating my first avatars while Au was busy writing this book between January and October of 2007).

This difference in audience accounts for one irritating thing about this work to this librarian: the absence of formal citations! This often led me to my web browser to run a Google keyword search or, (in some cases) to make a Claude or Gemini inquiry in natural language, and cross my fingers in hopes of finding the same information source which the author was referring to. Here’s a good example, taken from the Introduction to Au’s book:

U.S. Homeland Security was already there, financing biochemical terrorist attack simulations; Harvard’s Berkman Center was well ensconced, too, offering lectures on law and society to humans and flying robots alike; the venerable BBC was hosting live music concerts; NBC was launching their annual Christmas lighting ceremony virtually, while CBS was busy creating a metaverse version of Star Trek. Warner Brothers was promoting its latest artist with listening kiosks that resembled a New York loft; a research team from IBM was prototyping next-generation Internet technology; and Cisco, Dell, and Microsoft had virtual islands and schemes of their own.

Again, no references provided for any of Wagner’s assertions here of events taking place circa September 2026 in Second Life. In particular, my ears perked up when I read about the U.S. Homeland Security Department! I really wanted to know more about what the U.S. Homeland Security Department was doing in Second Life.

Rather than spending hours tracing each of these claims back to their original sources, I decided to turn to generative AI. I pasted the above paragraph into Claude AI (Opus 5.5, connected to the Undermind AI research tool), and asked it: “Could you please find the information sources Wagner James Au used in writing this paragraph about Second Life in 2006?”

Five minutes later, I got back the following summary, plus a full report (which I will not share here; the report includes thorough fact-checking against other information sources, and provides citations for all its sources in APA format):

I checked every clause in Au’s paragraph. All the organizations he names really were in Second Life, but the paragraph squeezes events from October 2005 to mid-2007 into one “already there” moment, and two details go further than the sources do.

  • Well supported: Harvard’s Berkman Center and the CyberOne course (September 2006), BBC Radio 1’s One Big Weekend (May 2006), NBC Universal’s virtual tree lighting (November 29, 2006), Sire/Warner’s Regina Spektor loft (May 2006), IBM (September–November 2006) and Dell Island (November 14, 2006).
  • Homeland Security: Au’s own 2005 blog post and 2006 First Monday essay support “DHS-funded disaster preparedness simulator.” I found nothing that names a “biochemical terrorist attack” scenario, and the event is from 2005, a year earlier than the paragraph suggests.
  • CBS’s Star Trek area: this is the weakest claim. It was announced in January–February 2007 and built by the Electric Sheep Company. Secondhand forum accounts say it was never finished, so “busy creating” is only accurate as of early 2007.
  • Cisco and Microsoft: Cisco’s islands opened in December 2006. Microsoft’s best-documented island, Visual Studio Island, is from 2007.
  • Spektor wasn’t a “new artist”: Begin to Hope was her fourth album.

Au’s wording for NBC, Warner/Sire and CBS closely matches a February 13, 2007 Hollywood Reporter roundup, which looks like his likely source. I couldn’t see the book’s endnotes, so that’s not confirmed.

The report includes APA-style sources for each claim, a suggested dated version of the paragraph for your OER text, and a list of primary sources to get next. Before quoting the DHS item, pull the archived copy of the October 2005 blog post from the Wayback Machine and check a print copy of the book’s notes.

This, by the way, is something at which Claude Opus 5.5 + Undermind shines: acting as a surprisingly thorough research assistant, definitely saving me hours of time!

Now, back to the business at hand: Wagner’s book and how it has aged since publication. How have his predictions about Second Life played out? Wagner does devote an entire chapter (chapter 13) to speculation about the future of Second Life, and he had other predictions sprinkled throughout the rest of this book. In many cases, I pasted sticky notes into my physical copy of the book, so I could come back afterwards and follow up a little bit about what did actually happen in the intervening 18 years since they were written. Few other observers can boast such longevity, and that alone makes his perspective valuable (even if his prognostications sometimes proved incorrect). Let’s look at some of Au’s statements, written in 2007 and published in 2008, and see how they have held up in the years since then.

Statement: On page 217, Au writes that “user-created online worlds like Second Life will be integral to the future Internet.” While Second Life has inspired many people as to the possibilities of the metaverse, and while it continues to be profitable for Linden Lab, I would argue that it has failed to become “integral.” Eighteen years after the publication of Au’s book, it remains a niche product (albeit one with a passionately devoted fanbase). Au refers to this scenario in his book as “Second Life Plateaus” (p. 221). Efforts to open-source SL viewers and servers led only to a myriad of smaller OpenSim systems, none of which proved to be as successful or enduring as Second Life itself.

Statement: On page 229, as part of brainstorming session in which Au participated: “Real-world companies will be incubated, developed, and in large part run in the metaverse, which will be the office space and whiteboard for employees across the world.” I can pretty confidently state that this prediction, sadly, did not come to pass, even after a pandemic forced a global lockdown! What happened was that people turned to more accessible tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, rather than (as I mentioned before) working their way up what was the still steep learning curve of Second Life. Setting up an avatar was not as simple as sitting in front of a webcam!

Statement: There’s a whole section of Au’s book (pp. 232-234) where the author discusses with Philip Rosedale the possibility of using the metaverse as a way to live forever, via “uploading our very consciousness into SL, similar to what futurists like Ray Kurzweil imagined.” (p. 233). Even with the recent generative AI advances since 2022, this is still something which remains fully in the realm of science-fiction speculation!

Statement: In a section where Au gives advice to businesses wishing to set up shop in SL, he states: “Find a killer SL app: Take the time to create a utility or service that both is unique to SL and leverages the main element that makes SL unique: dynamic user-created content in an international virtual community” (p. 260). Unfortunately, after the corporate boom-and-bust circa 2006-2008, few real-world businesses have bothered with Second Life, and a “killer SL app” (i.e., one that would make people want to set up a Second Life account, and use the platform) failed to materialize. Something that people inside of SL would already use and appreciate? Yes, there have been many such success stories. Something that would entice people to join and stay in SL? By and large, nope.

Statement: Au writes, in the preface to the book (p. xv): “Odds are that user-created virtual worlds like Second Life will soon be the targets of financial mergers (and again, as this book reaches press, you may have already read about such plans on business news sites).” At the venerable age of 23, Linden Lab still has avoided merging with another company (although they did eventually spin off Tilia, their financial services section, selling it to Thunes). It has, somewhat miraculously, literally remained its own world, with its own culture. In fact, its still-thriving adult content and activities probably make it a less-tempting acquisitions target among larger companies seeking to gain a toehold in the metaverse. What’s interesting is that so many, much larger companies, have tried (and, in many cases, failed) to build their own, competing metaverse platforms (*cough*Meta*cough*).

*Having spent some time looking at this New World Notes archive website, however, I noticed that there was no way to do a keyword search for older blogposts, and using Google Search with the site: feature (e.g. site:wagnerjamesau.com “Losing Voice”) also failed me. Also, I discovered to my dismay that, despite Au’s assertion that “this is an archive of New World Notes from 2006 to late 2025, when Typepad, my blog’s original service, went out of business“, that the archive only went back as far as April 15th, 2020 (here is a link to the final page). Therefore, this archive is of limited use to anyone who wants to directly access past/older blogposts. Wagner himself refers people to use the Wayback Machine to find old blogposts via their former Typepad blog URLs. This loss of boots-on-the-ground reporting is actually a serious blow to future virtual world historians, and unfortunately, one that is happening more often over time, as companies who provided infrastructure (like Typepad) shut down.

COMING IN PART TWO: Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human

Tom Boellstorff (whom I have actually met and talked with in Second Life, briefly, after one of his in-world presentations) is a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, where he studies (among other topics) virtual worlds. According to the publisher of his book Coming of Age in Second Life. Princeton University Press:

Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He conducted his research as the avatar “Tom Bukowski,” and applied the rigorous methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behaviour, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group.

In other words, this is a more academically-oriented book. At the time of its publication, it was the first book of anthropology to examine Second Life. Tom is considered a pioneer in bringing “anthropological tools into virtual worlds and online communities-spaces once considered marginal to real life.”

NOTE: The task of reading through these three paper books—note to mention, annotating them with sticky notes!—has taken me longer than anticipated. (My workflow is much more streamlined for full-text electronic books and articles.) Therefore, I have decided to just post my notes from the first two books today, as Part One, and then write a part 2 of this blogpost, a review of the third book, once I have finished reading it. Part 2 coming soon!