It seems the marriage of David Pollard and Amy Taylor is heading toward divorce, due to Pollard’s virtual affair with a virtual prostitute, uncovered by a virtual private detective hired by Taylor.
It occurs to me that the key thing William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and the 80s cyberpunk movement got wrong when they were conjecturing about the future of networked data communications, was that immersive media digital communities would be cool, awe-inspiring and practical.
So far –as this preposterous divorce reveals– the vision’s actual manifestations in SecondLife and the MMOGs, can only be described as fantastically uninspiring, stupid, and worst of all, boring. It may be initially amusing/entertaining to read about the emotional stress being experienced by Pollard and Taylor, but what makes it funny (its absurdity, and impracticality) also quickly renders it boring in mass effect.
The capacity of exotic communications technology to induce extreme boredom in a broad market audience is one of Second Life’s most conspicuous and surprising features. The oft-noted extremely high ratio of registrants to active users is a testament to this effect. It’s interesting therefore that while the technology was anticipated, as was the potential for initial mass market engagement, the power of community social dynamics to induce extreme and dissuasive boredom was not.