Second Life: The Future of Social Networking?
Abstract
Second Life is a sophisticated 3D Virtual World which has emerged from the 3D gaming genre to become a potentially significant environment for social networking. While it still has a gaming community, its rapidly increasing popularity over the last year or so has much more to do with the wider interest being shown in its use for education, social networking, and business. Second Life has developed an economy linked to the real world which provides a more compelling argument for being self-sustaining than is the case with current social-technical systems such as FaceBook. Second Life, as with other similar Virtual World systems, is a complex environment in which a virtual culture is established by both the capabilities of the environment and also the actors in that environment in which many themes exist concurrently and can interact and interfere with each other. In this chapter we look at Second Life and assess its strength as a social networking environment using the Web of System Performance (WOSP) methodology.
Keywords
Social Networks Second Life WOSPPreview
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