The Politics of Second Life

For the uninitiated who aren’t hip enough to already have an “avatar,” and whose personal assets don’t include Linden dollars, let me introduce you to Second Life (SL), an alternate cyber-world, more or less like our own, except that its inhabitants can fly and teleport.

Unlike more conventional online networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, whose members are limited to mere profile pages, SL offers its subscribers an online world where their avatars, cartoon proxies for real-life people, interact, albeit online, in all the ways you and I interact in the real world. Among other things, SL has its own currency, the Linden dollar, which can be exchanged for American dollars.

However dehumanizing this latest brand of online social networking may appear, there are nevertheless important political implications for an online world whose five million plus citizens are looking for engaging banter, especially once the novelty of flying around and teleporting wears off.

Political organizers are especially excited about this online world, which they see as a recruiting and training ground for campaign volunteers. Moreover, SL is an ideal place to hold political rallies and protests because it offers candidates an engaged international audience in a way that’s a little more tangible than TV, but not quite like real life.

This may seem like an unlikely proposition, but as it turns out, all four major candidates in the latest French presidential elections had SL campaign headquarters that each received thousands of visitors daily—far more than their real headquarters would ever dream of. Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign headquarters was its own island; François Bayrou’s handed out t-shirts that read, “Sexy Centrist”; at one point, protesters staged riots outside the headquarters of far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen’s headquarters and tossed exploding pigs at security officers.

But, political campaigning in SL isn’t just a French hobby to fill the hours leftover from the 35-hour workweek. Indeed, SL may be the frontier of Internet campaign advertising in the U.S. too. Supporters of the Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards campaigns have already set up de-facto headquarters and social organizations for their respective camps. Recently, a virtual Capitol Hill was also constructed to encourage civic discussion.

Arguably, SL may be a little out-there for the average voter. (I’ll confess that—keep in mind my experience is extremely limited—I still have trouble getting my avatar to turn right and left, let alone drive a car or fly). And, the notion of candidates holding cyber rallies is admittedly silly, especially when one takes into consideration the fact that in addition to human features, avatars can be made to look like squirrels and ride around on yaks. To those who already decry the ubiquity of Facebook and the way it distracts us from real human interaction, the idea that people could lead their entire lives—even romantic relationships—in an online world must be arresting. Should political discourse be reduced to this cartoon world?

But, these questions are ultimately irrelevant. For better or worse, as the population of five million grows, SL is bound to garner more attention from politicians, who hardly need reminding that a few thousand votes one way or the other can make the difference. In a tight election campaign, like the recent French one, we shouldn’t be surprised to see politicians and their staffers logging-in to SL. In fact, we should embrace the democratization of SL and related experiments in political engagement that reach out to a marginalized, but otherwise discriminating and informed audience. After all, a few avatars could be the difference.



Clay A. Dumas ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Holworthy Hall.