Monday, August 20, 2007

Is this mic live?

Somewhere in Second Life, I'm guessing that people are jabbering away, using the integrated voice facility. They must be. Everyone demanded this feature, right? Everyone wanted it more than anything else, including making SL for stable, right? They said so. It must be true.

As you can tell from the paucity of recent entries in this blog, I haven't had much time to spend in world lately. There are a lot of reasons for this. The result is few adventures, no photos, and just not a whole lot to write about. But I have noticed one thing in my infrequent forays into SL. It's still just as silent and typing-oriented as it ever was, at least for me.

Despite having been slapped recently for breaking out of immersion mode to have non-SL contact with a select group of people I've met through SL (no biggie, I'm tougher than I look), I really am basically an immersionist in SL. I fully support our world, our imagination, and the ability of people to be anyone or anything they want to be in SL. What happens in SL stays in SL. This is not a licence to behave irresponsibly but simply a way to keep SL as a world separate from, and maybe better than, all that first life out there.

If anyone can be an immersionist with voice, more power to them. Maybe I'll find that works for me as well. For now, I just haven't cared enough about talking to bother to set up the facility in my client. No one I know seems to care. We are happily typing to each other as we ever did, continuing to juggle local conversation and however many IM windows we have open.

I also have no argument with augmentationists. There are no rules for how to use SL. If that's what you want, go for it, as long as I don't get dragged into it, and as long as I still have the freedom to avoid such a thing.

But if you drag too much first life into SL and you're not a close friend, I will politely take my leave.

1 comment:

Peter Stindberg said...

Ain't need no voice. I don't even have the hardware for it, despite the social acceptance of my surroundings to use it. And you DON'T want to listen to my accent :-)