O.K. it’s time to inject a little levity (thanks, Neobela!):
It’s so funny because it’s true. Second Life users make friends and build communities not based on physical proximity, but on mental and emotional connections between their avatars. That very basic fact, common to all virtual worlds and social VR platforms, may be a life-saver to those people who, either by choice or by circumstance, are forced to self-isolate in their homes because of quarantines and the imposition of social distancing policies by their governments.
And it’s not just Second Life. It’s any virtual world, and the concept applies to the newer social VR platforms like Sansar, too.
I am one of those depressed people who often walks away from a real-world interaction with a friend or acquaintance with an uplift in my mood. And I know that I often can replicate that response, when I interact with other people in a virtual world, too. My brain literally does not know the difference between a real-world interaction and a virtual-world one, and it responds the same way.
Of course, this works both ways: someone in my real life or or in virtual one can just as easily bring me down and depress me further. But the fact remains that social VR platforms and virtual worlds are built on the foundation of human communication. It literally doesn’t matter if those humans are living right next door or at the other end of the globe in our modern era of information technology. We can find our own community, people who share our thoughts, goals, and dreams, and literally build new worlds!
So, while the SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 outbreak continues, don’t forget to sign into your favourite social VR/virtual world platform(s) from time to time, to reconnect with your communities.
Last night, a friend sent me the following message, along with a graph showing how the number of new daily cases of SARS-CoV-2 was slowly tapering down in China:
Might be good to post a bit of positive virus news? I certainly think balance is a good thing on a blog.
Yes, balance is important, and I will admit my coverage of the rapidly-evolving epidemic has been rather dire lately. Trying to find an appropriate balance when reporting about a potential pandemic situation is very difficult. And I do apologize if it’s bringing you down.
However, I would rather be accused of being Mr. Doom and Gloom if it meant that even just one person reading my blogposts about SARS-CoV-2 begins to take it seriously enough to prepare—mentally, emotionally, and physically—for a pandemic.
While the news out of China is somewhat encouraging (if we can trust the figures being released by the Chinese government), the fact remains that China has had to impose some severe, even draconian, measures to get those results: restricting the movements of millions of people and confining them to their homes, shutting down public transportation and factories and markets and all public gatherings.
The question remains: are countries outside China willing to go to the same extremes in order to halt further spread of the coronavirus?
Ask yourself: if you were forced, right now, to stay home for two weeks, without leaving to go grocery shopping or to the pharmacy, how well would you be able to adapt? That is exactly the situation now being faced by people in various communities in South Korea, Iran, and Italy. Next week, next month, next quarter, it could be your town or city.
I’ve been writing about the Wuhan coronavirus for one month now, on and off, and my message has always been the same: prepare. Prepare now, before the majority of people who aren’t paying attention are caught unprepared when an outbreak happens near you, and the panic shopping begins, despite public announcements for calm.
So I’m sorry if I’m bringing you down, but as a H5N1 bird flu prepper from way back in 2005/2006, and as a science librarian, I see what what is happening now as a serious wake-up call.
Yes, we dodged a bullet back in 2005/2006, but I can tell you this: we aren’t going to be so lucky this time around. The H5N1 bird flu died out because sustained human-to-human transmission proved too difficult. But SARS-CoV-2 is proving itself surprisingly adept at human-to-human transmission. We have a sprightly virus on our hands!
The virus is already out there circulating and one day, it will be at your doorstep. Don’t panic, but prepare.
Good Sources of Information on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19
Here is my updated list of good, credible, authoritative resources to learn more about the Wuhan coronoavirus (formerly called 2019-nCoV and now officially called SARS-CoV-2; the disease the virus causes is now called COVID-19):
Another instructive YouTuber to watch is Dr. John Campbell, a British nurse educator who very clearly explains what you need to know
If you prefer to get your informtion via audio, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) has started a weekly half-hour podcast on SoundCloud, called COVID-19: What’s Happening Now.
If you want a quick, up-to-date overview of the current situation, here are three good places to check:
2019-nCoV Global Cases (by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University); other good statistics dashboards can be found here and here.
The messaging from North American government authorities about the global SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak (and the disease it causes, COVID-19) has taken a noticeable change in tone in the past few days.
In a shift from previous messages, Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Theresa Tam acknowledged Monday that Canada may no longer be able to contain and limit the virus if it continues to spread around the world. She said governments, businesses and individuals should prepare for an outbreak or pandemic.
“We are coming to similar conclusions,” agreed Dr. Vera Etches, the City of Ottawa’s top health officer, on Monday. “It looks like it is going to be more and more difficult to contain this virus and it may well evolve into a pandemic. That would change the efforts to contain every last case and contact.”
Etches said people can take steps now, at home and at work, to prepare.
Some of those steps include stocking up on needed prescriptions ahead of time so there is no need to do so during a possible pandemic. She also recommended people stock up on non-perishable food.
“Imagine if someone was ill for a week. What would you need?”
Note that the Canadian authorities are now warning people to stock up on their prescriptions and on non-perishable food, in preparation for implementation of social distancing policies and possible quarantines.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also waning people to prepare themselves for significant disruption to society and daily life. Dr. Nancy Messonnier said:
Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a top US health official, says a community spread of coronavirus in the United States is now inevitable. Photo: Reuters/South China Morning Post
I understand this whole situation may seem overwhelming, and that disruption to everyday life may be severe. But these are things things that people need to start thinking about now. I had a conversation with my family over breakfast this morning, and I told my children that, while I didn’t think that they were at risk right now, we as a family need to be preparing for significant disruption of our lives.
— Dr. Nancy Messonnier, Director of the Center for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a press briefing today
Here is the complete CDC press briefing (it’s about 35 minutes long):
What this means for you, reading this now, is that you need to prepare yourself and your family for the possibility that you will need to stay in your homes for a period of several weeks, avoiding contact with as many other people as possible, as a wave of illness caused by the Wuhan coronavirus sweeps through your community, forcing schools, businesses, and public transportation and public gathering places like movie theatres and shopping malls to close (as we already seen in Wuhan and many other cities in China). The time to prepare for this is NOW.
At least two weeks of food and other supplies (toilet paper, first aid supplies, soap and hand sanitizer, garbage bags, etc.). There are already reports of panic buying in places such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Italy. You do not want to leave it to the last minute!
Refills of all your presecription medications, plus a stock of over-the-counter medicines (talk to your doctor and pharmacist about creating an emergency supply of your prescription medication).
Power sources (flashlights, extra batteries, car chargers and adapters for your mobile devices, etc.).
Sign up for any local alerts from your city, state/province, or federal government (or know where to find the information on the Internet). Find out what plans your employer is making (and if they’re not making them now, they should be).
If you haven’t yet, get your seasonal flu shot. It can’t hurt, and it will help to figure out whether or not you do have SARS-CoV-2 if/when you do become sick. Many areas now give out the flu shot for free.
Train yourself NOT to touch your eyes, nose, and mouth! The SARS-CoV-2 virus can remain viable on hard surfaces anywhere from 2 hours to 9 days (scientific journal article source), and you can transfer the virus from your infected hands to your mouth, nose, and eyes by touching or rubbing them.
Watch the following video from the World Health Organization on how wash your hands! Yes, I know I have posted it before. You may think you already know how to wash your hands properly, but you still might learn something you didn’t know before. Proper hand hygiene will also help you avoid catching regular seasonal colds and influenza, so there’s a net benefit to society.
Good Sources of Information on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19
Here is my updated list of good, credible, authoritative resources to learn more about the Wuhan coronoavirus (formerly called 2019-nCoV and now officially called SARS-CoV-2; the disease the virus causes is now called COVID-19):
Another instructive YouTuber to watch is Dr. John Campbell, a British nurse educator who very clearly explains what you need to know
If you prefer to get your informtion via audio, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) has started a weekly half-hour podcast on SoundCloud, called COVID-19: What’s Happening Now.
If you want a quick, up-to-date overview of the current situation, here are three good places to check:
2019-nCoV Global Cases (by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University); other good statistics dashboards can be found here and here.
One evening last week, I decided to take a break from the Educators in VR conference sessions, and I did something I had not done in at least two months—I loaded up an anonymous alt and I paid a visit to Sansar.
Like most other worlds in Sansar, the Galleria shopping mall I visited was utterly deserted, despite showing up at the top of the Popular list in my Codex. (There were certainly no more than forty avatars total in all of Sansar on this particular evening.) After half an hour of morose window-shopping, I signed out again, feeling even more depressed than when I signed in.
I find it almost inconceivable that a mere eleven months ago, we had not one but two social VR platforms, into which their respective companies had poured years of software development work and millions of dollars, throwing splashy, well-attended events in an effort to outdo each other. Today, both of those companies have laid off dozens of staff, one platform has shut down completely, and the other is actively shopping around for someone to take it over, or it will probably shut down too.
Sansar user Zero Cheese posted the following three-minute recording of the most recent Sansar Product Meetup to his Twitter, where the users took to the stage instead of the Linden Lab staff, and instead of cheering me up, all it did was break my heart:
Throughout my three-year journey as a beta tester and blogger, one of the most special things about Sansar has always been its intrepid community of users and content creators, who may have been small in number but mighty in spirit.
There was always the feeling that the next wave of users would be just around the corner, that the next update with its shiny new features would be just enough to entice people to come in, to pay return visits, to move in, to set up homes and stores, and to build a new world.
It never happened. Why?
There will be no shortage of onlookers (armchair quarterbacks) who will speculate on what they think High Fidelity and Linden Lab did wrong, but I would suspect that many of their answers would revolve around one word: hubris.
To the ancient Greeks, hubris referred to extreme pride, especially pride and ambition so great that they offended the gods and led to one’s downfall. Wikipedia says:
Hubris (/ˈhjuːbrɪs/, from ancient Greek ὕβρις) describes a personality quality of extreme or foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance.
Simply put, it was that the people who ran High Fidelity and Linden Lab thought they already knew very well what people wanted, largely based on their shared past corporate experience with Second Life. Oh, they still sought input from the users, from time to time, but overall, they went ahead and did exactly what they pleased, confident that (to borrow a line from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams) if they built it, people would come.
Well, they built it (or, at the very least, they made a good solid start of building it). But the people didn’t come. Why?
I think that Ebbe Altberg and his team at Linden Lab can’t win no matter what they do. If they continue to throw too much time and money at Second Life, Sansar will suffer and they’re betting the future on Sansar…Yet if they try to promote Sansar…folks who are wedded to Second Life get upset.
Wagner James Au of the long-running blog New World Notes received a torrent of comments from Sansar haters when he reported on the current uncertain status of the Sansar project last Friday. It would appear that many Second Life users are still extremely upset at what they feel were all the resources that Linden Lab put into Sansar—time and money that they feel strongly should have been invested into improving Second Life. (Note that we do not know, and will probably never know, what outside investors put their money into Sansar, if any.) That visceral hatred fed into the perfect storm of events that has put the Sansar project in the position it is now in, being shopped around by Linden Lab in hopes of finding investors, lest it pull the plug completely.
Reading through all the comments in Wagner’s blogpost got me to thinking: how could Linden Lab have handled this situation better? Hindsight is 20/20, but to me it seems clear that the company could have handled its messaging about Sansar to Second Life users a lot better than it did.
The message from Linden Lab was clear: Sansar was not intended to replace Second Life; they were meant to be two separate platforms. While that might have allayed the many initial fears by Second Life users that their beloved virtual world was imminently going to be shut down, it also sidestepped the bigger question: how was Linden Lab going to move users from Second Life to Sansar? Because it rapidly became obvious that most Second Life users, in fact the overwhelming majority of them, were very happy with SL, thank you very much, and nothing and nobody was going to entice them to move.
Galen, in his most recent guest editorial, was right: Linden Lab should have built some bridges between Second Life and Sansar, in order to make it easier to gently encourage SL’s userbase to begin to explore Sansar. Expecting users to give up their inventories and start over again from scratch in a new virtual world was probably a tactical error. Why couldn’t we have used the Linden dollar in Sansar, for example?
I do remember that, at some point in the past, I read that Linden Lab was going to “reserve” all existing Second Life usernames in Sansar, so they could be assumed by SL folks who wished to migrate over and keep their identities. What happened to that plan? What happened to any plan to make it easier to Second Life users to migrate?
Linden Lab’s mismanagement of communication with its Second Life users with respect to Sansar and their intentions was, I believe, a key factor in their downfall. We will probably never know what Linden Lab’s big game plan was with Sansar vis-à-vis Second Life. Perhaps they didn’t even know themselves. But it’s clear that they felt they knew how to repeat that early success with Second Life. And they have been proven wrong.
Philip Rosedale, the founding CEO of Linden Lab and creator of Second Life, also thought he knew the secret to creating a successful, popular successor to Second Life. And he, and the team he led, were also proven wrong.
It has been a rather spectacular downfall for both companies.
Where does everybody go from here? Hell if I know. I just report on the events; I have long given up trying to predict them. My track record is crap. For example, I predicted Cryptovoxels would fail, only to see the platform thrive. I predicted Virtual Universe would be a success, only to see it fail and fold. And I was completely taken by surprise at both High Fidelity’s and Sansar’s layoffs over the past twelve months.
It remains to be seen whether the newer crop of social VR platforms and virtual worlds will learn from what happened to High Fidelity and Sansar, or even what the lessons to be learned are. More remains to be written, but I will leave that to another day.
