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!
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
