A tourist in Second Life

I know that as soon as you have an account in Second Life, you're a Resident, but as far as I'm concerned, The Residents are a bizarre conceptual rock band. So I'm still a tourist in SL, and will be until I change my avatar to look like an eyeball in formal attire.

The screen shot that illustrates this post is of my avatar, Isobel Jinx, posing in front of Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring and wearing a free t-shirt she picked up at the genetic genealogy section of Info Island's genealogy presence. How like a tourist (though I have to say that none of the free t-shirts I've picked up in Real Life fit like that^). It was pretty ironic that one of the first buildings I would stumble into in SL would be the genealogy center (yes, I am heavily into genealogy but grad school cuts into my research time).

After reading the tweets of my classmates who got to SL before I did, I was worried about basic concerns like learning to walk and so forth, but the initial signup and avatar creation process went pretty well for me (though it was very odd to see people falling out of the sky at Help Island). I didn't have much trouble figuring out how to move around, and in short order had teleported to Info Island. I spent a lot of my time wandering around the December holidays exhibit and the Peace Park, devoted to various religions. It seemed like a tranquil place, plus it had singing birds, so there I was birding in SL (four species on my SL list so far, plus a couple more unidentified; none actually seen). I liked the Buddhist shrine and meditation space; it seemed so cool. It wasn't until I was driving home from RU and its high-speed connection that night that I realized the wonderfully exotic opportunity to meditate in SL was really a mundane mental discipline I've done in Real Life off and on over the years (mostly off, because meditation isn't exotic at all, really).

So far in SL, when I see another Resident, I run the other way. As a result, I haven't had any of the "Naked Life" experiences some of my classmates have had (whew). I guess it's possible to be shy in a virtual world, too. The look of the world reminds me a lot of the game Myst; otherworldly yet a little too tidy, at the same time. The SL version of Old Queens campus WAS pretty neat though.

I discovered that you can do SL on dial-up (yes, it's wrong, but still possible). I'm very intrigued by the various organizations that have staked out a presence there, plus the option of having an avatar that can try out things you might not want to (yet) in Real Life. Sort of a test universe, as it were. I will probably keep playing around with it in the future. On the other hand, as someone who often prefers dealing with information rather than people, I hope that this is not going to be the new model of surfing the web. I would rather just find the data I want, rather than having to go through some avatar to do the same thing. But perhaps others would feel differently.