Lee’s Second Life - “Finding the key”

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Okay, so here’s the thing:

As some of you may know by now, I am starting a three year research project into Second Life, looking at the following areas:

What differences and opportunities are there when building and maintaining business relationships within virtual environments (in particular Second Life) compared to those we build and manage in our day-to-day ‘First Life’?

Along the way I will be looking into such topic areas as

• neurophysiology
• neuropsychology
• social psychology (particularly with regard to ‘identity’ and ‘play’)
• sociology
• cultural studies (lead especially by McLuhan’s ground-breaking work on virtuality and communication)
• communication theory and practice — both face-to-face and virtual
• virtuality from a psychological perspective
• existing uses of virtual environments for business communication (including teaching and experiential learning)
• possible uses of them for that
• what ‘PR’ means in the virtual world versus the ‘real’ world (as an aside, how much of our working life today is not spent in some virtual, disembodied environment — the computer, the telephone…? Could we be said to already be spending the vast majority of our working day in the virtual environment, in which case is a 3D environment like Second Life just an extension of what we already do?)

Three years of research, study, journal article writing, presentations and hopefully as a result of a final, fourth, year of writing up and refinement a PhD will pop out at the end.

I’m pleased that two existing clients are currently considering allowing me to build them a Second Life presence to test out some of my theories. No names yet until all is finalised, but they know who they are!

Wish me luck!

p.s. please feel free to drop me a line (SL at LeeHopkins dot net) to discuss any of the academic issues noted above. And don’t forget to subscribe to my rss feed!

p.p.s Oh, and I’ve cross-posted below some relevant posts from my main blog…

Technorati : mcluhan, neurophysiology, research, second life, virtual

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