The primitives I am working with

I've enjoyed reading everyone's posts, so after a week of diving in (and flying around) SL here are a few things that I've found interesting, academically and otherwise. I have enjoyed chatting with a few class members already in-world - this should be fun. (Or, Deckard Jameson has chatted and enjoyed it? Argh.)

I took the class because it was interdisciplinary and interesting - I really had no idea how it would relate to my research, if at all. That's good because in the last week of using SL I've found a whole bunch of things about it that I love that have very little to do with my research, like:

• "travel writing" -- I collected a few lists of "places to visit" and spent way too much time visiting different sights and writing notes on them. I would think doing some travel writing on different SL sights would be a blast.
• "the book experience" -- I'm kind of a book nerd, in the sense that I like the 'experience' of a book (that can't be found on the Web) so I was interested to see if/how the good ol' book would adapt to the SL world. I went to visit the SL Library and several book publishers. And, I visited a bunch of "bookstores" to see if anyone had managed to create that great "third place" feel of a good coffee house or old bookstore. (Or, err ... would that be "fourth place"? I get confused easily.)
• "snapshot aesthetics" -- I started taking snapshots early on and they were so bad I had to spend time learning the camera controls. Then I started wondering what qualifies as a good snapshot in SL.
  
• avatar creation -- To do some posed snapshots I started creating different avatar "roles/skins/???" to use as "models." Fooling with the sliders in different ways brought back lots of lessons on anatomy from art classes that I thought were lost forever. If I were a (professional) actor I think I would be thrilled at my ability to throw off physical constraints in the creation of a role.
  

So ... I'm not sure exactly how SL relates to my current research directions, though it certainly does. Thus far in my research I have been looking closely at the rise of online social networks (ie MySpace or Facebook) and how people use them to connect and relate to each other. (Example: when I say you are my "friend" online, what are the obligations/expectations I have about our relationship?) So, like Narasi and others I'm interested in the "quality" of SL relationships.

Beyond the metaphysical questions I'm interested in SL as a technology of social connection, too. There are pieces of the "social network toolbox" built in to SL (ie profiles) - but how will this aspect of SL evolve, if at all? Could a future version of SL provide residents with the same sort of "uses and gratifications" that, say, MySpace does today for those who use it? If not, what about the experience of both is different?

So many questions, not enough avatars to find out the answers ...