And now, time to talk about Second Life, because you can’t get enough of a good thing, can you?
One of the key theorists underpinning my research is the late great Henri Lefebvre. Henri was a French sociologist and philosopher who understood that ‘spaces’ were not holes in buildings, but actually built environments in their own regard.
Now, before you think that I’m rapidly disappearing up my own virtual sphincter, let me explain how a 20th century sociologist who philosophised about the Marxist use of space and a 21st century business communicator – me – can be aligned when I am neither a philosopher nor a Marxist.
Lefebvre believed that space was not just emptiness, but that it comprised three essential elements: physical, mental and cultural. So for Second Life that would equate to physical being the actual space — a piazza, a lobby, a park, a mezzanine.
Second, the mental could be how we perceive that space for ourselves — what that space means to us as an individual. For example, is it a waste of space? Is it dead space? Is it somewhere we can create something? Is it somewhere we can admire something?
Thirdly, the cultural element of Lefebvre’s ‘space’ is what part it plays in the social milieu around it — does it allow, for example, others to share the space and co-create, or co-admire each other’s creations? Does it allow for community co-operation? Does it signify a power hegemony?
This third point starts to meander into my research, so I will stay with it a little while longer.
In asking if the space signifies a power hegemony, let us ask ourselves what use does a corporate built environment have for the community? If we accept that space — be it an empty mezzanine floor with walls of artwork, or a town square with a fountain and park benches — is not created ab nihilo (out of nothing) but is created for a specific purpose or practice, then what are the spaces that corporations build used for? Do they benefit the local community or do they merely exist to serve as a symbol for the power of the corporation? This latter question might be an example of what might be called ‘willie waving’, wherein I am a large powerful corporation with tons of money, therefore I can afford to buy a HUGE island and build elaborate offices with spaces around and within them.
I sidestep the answer — only because I don’t have one — to consider what the word ‘community’ means. Does it mean a singular community, such as the entire SL population? Is it a plurality, such as nearby islands and cultural groups? Or is it merely the corporation’s own hegemonic-friendly tribe?
This may all sound EXCEEDINGLY like I am crawling up my own virtual sphincter, but they are important issues to consider.
My research is rapidly finding its own pathway, and I am in the process of renaming my research proposition to this: “Finding the key: unlocking the door that bars SMEs from entering virtual worlds.”
My reasoning for this is thus: We have bus loads of corporates rushing into SL, seemingly for the purpose of establishing a branding beachhead amongst the next wave of digiliterati. They have the luxury of having pots of money to splash about on not only buying an island, but also paying the monthly island rental fee AND pay some expensive developers oodles of dosh to build them something ‘special’.
The individual SOHO operator can create whatever digital items they like and sell them to the various publics within SL. They don’t need to buy their own island if they don’t want to, their shop rental costs can be quite low if they look hard enough, and their only real costs are traditional marketing and advertising ones: running ads in the classifieds, running ads in the various SL media, growing and maintaining their contact lists. In this regard SL is no different from ‘real life’ direct marketing — the power is all in the list. The bigger the list, the bigger the dollars if you do things correctly.
So at each end of the business spectrum we have activity — corporates splashing dollars about in branding and experimentation exercises; individual entrepreneurs saving their dollars for traditional marketing and advertising activities.
But what of the largest group of business, the Small-to-Medium Enterprise, (aka SME)? They can’t afford to buy expensive islands, stock them with expensive buildings and pay the monthly rental fees. They can’t afford to have full-time members of staff spending all their time ‘playing’ in this new online ‘game’. Nor can they design and build digital items for sale, either because they can’t afford the loss of productivity in their business while someone spends time learning how to create digital objects, researches what the company should make, then sets up a shop stall to sell them; or the chances are high that any digital goods the company might consider making are totally foreign to its existing ‘real world’ brand and product mix.
So what use are virtual worlds to SMEs? Plenty, I would argue, because the 3D virtual world is what the internet experience will rapidly become — they just need to have the technology and bandwidth issues sorted out for them.
All of which circles back nicely to my research and a dead French Marxist.
I believe that there are new and valuable lessons for SMEs to learn and progress through in order to deal effectively with and within the 3D virtual world. I just don’t know what they are yet — no one does. Which is why I am not alone in exploring from an academic perspective the 3D virtual environment, of which SL is currently the flavour of the month.
But if a dead French Marxist can alert the world to the until-then overlooked fact that empty spaces in built environments are not just holes but actually have semiotic meaning, then looking at how SOHO digitally creative entrepreneurs generate and use space, and how corporates use and create space, might just open a door to how SMEs can use the 3D virtual space to further their business objectives.
After all, in the mid 1990s we all learnt that carrying the print mentality across to the then-new world wide web didn’t ‘work’, so we had to learn what the new ‘rules of engagement’ were. So too with 3D virtual worlds, and if we are still figuring out the rules for blogging then we are surely still a little way off from figuring out what works and what doesn’t when the populations of 3D virtual worlds reach critical mass.
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