[extropy-chat] second life question

spike spike66 at comcast.net
Sun Dec 3 21:29:13 UTC 2006


Since the subject of second life is popping up here, I have a question or an
observation.

I first saw email and the bulletin boards in fall of 79.  Looking over the
contents I noted that it was about 10% Star Trek/SciFi, about 10%
dungeons&dragons/fantasy, about half lonely hearts, and the remaining 30%
was serious science, engineering and everything else put together.  Being
single and 18 years at the time, I thought the lonely hearts bit was cool,
but I soon found that the participants were about 80% men.  Of the 20%
women, about half of them were gay men.  The few hetero women there were
worshipped as the goddesses that they were.

Fast forward ~15 yrs, www showed up.  At first a lot of that was used for
porno and lonely hearts, but with more actual women this time.

Forward another 5 years to around 99/00 when Pleasure Palace came along.
Interactive avatars, real-time chat, intentionally set up for lonely hearts,
still mostly men but a better ratio than before.

Looks like in some ways Second Life is an extension of Pleasure Palace, more
polish, more real estate, more content, less likely to crash, more choices,
better graphics, etc, yet much of the bandwidth is used for substitute
meat-world social interaction and lonely hearts.  Most importantly, this
incarnation appears to be approximately gender balanced.

Could this be?  Or is it a trick?  Am I the only one who has noticed this?

spike

   





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