Having been around for all the hype when MUDs and MOOs were going to take over the world and become our technologically mediated social environment, I have a lot of sympathy for Danah’s skepticism about the meaning of the (strong but almost always greatly overstated) growth of the Second Life population.

As tempting as it is to believe that better and improved technology and bandwidth will be the panacea for all of Second Life’s ills (and it will be for many of the things that make me hate to spend time there– the constant lags and downtimes, the endlessly buggy client, the ridiculously cumbersome building techniques, the lack of efficient channels to bring information in and out of the world, and the sheer clunkiness of the interface), I think ultimately it will just expose the faulty underlying premise of the Second Life devotees visions of ubiquitous adoption: that people explicitly want a virtual space to live in all the time in which new social structures can emerge.

I’m a pretty firm believer in the singularity when there will be a truly ubiquitous virtuality which we continuously inhabit. But that’s a long way into the future. It’s a kind of chicken and egg conundrum where the emergence of new and different virtual social structures will only come about as the virtual space inhabits and colonizes the physical space enabling such structures in the first place. Second Life is to that ultimate virtuality as MUDs and MOOs are to Second Life… distant cousins of historical importance but best soon forgotten. The more time I spend in SL and listening to SL believers, the less convinced I am of its relevance.

I suspect there will be some resemblance between the Singularitarian future and Second Life because they are both intimately tied to virtual spaces and our representations in them… but that’s a pretty broad parallel. At this point, I see SL as essentially a social networking tool not unlike other social networking sites, blogs, wikis, etc… though a tool that works less well, has considerably more bandwidth and processing demands and considerably less general application and utility.