When I was first introduced to the Second Life world I was fascinated with a real world that revolved in fictional world. I originally thought that it was made to facilitate long distant learning. Universities had set up classes that were taught by avatar professors and attended by avatar students. http://www.hawaii.edu/secondlife/
When I looked more into the Second Life site I soon realized it was much more then just a University setting, it truly was a complete second world.
I found several aspects of this world to be quite amazing, one in particular is that when you leave the Second Life world things that you have created stay and function while you are not present. The world functions independent of your presence. That in it self is hard to fathom.
The Second Life phenomena has proven to have both good and bad qualities, much like the real world.
Good Aspects:
Individuals can experiment with their creativity.
People with debilitating deceases can function as whole beings with no disabilities.
Opportunities to create business and make money seem to be limitless.
While choices have less to no consequences, this can be viewed as both good and bad.
Your new self or altar ego can experiment with things you might not in the real world. Your avatar can do so with no stigmatism that would affect your real self in the real world. Examples of this would be choosing to experiment with clothing, line of work, or how you might choose to look physically, changing your sex to be male if you are female and vise versa.
The movie Avatar, while the story line is completely based on colonialism, it is a great example of how the real life crossing over to a 3-D life. It is a small sample of becoming another being and entering into another world.
I enjoy human contact too much.
I also watched a documentary on people that have entered this Second Life. Kasi Nafus entered the Second Life world to just experiment with the avatar. She found that she did not like the clothing available for her avatar so she created a clothing line and started ab business.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=S2yGqDecBzs&feature=PlayList&p=57AD5CC0252818E7&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=21
From what I could see she had a hard time being taken seriously in the real world. She seemed to be a little frustrated that people did not understand how hard it is to create and that she really had a talent that is valid. I am sure that the money she is making is validation for her own self validation.
Another man, Yaniv Wolf, entered the Second Life world completely. He completely left or gave up his real life. He talked about leaving the “carbon based world.” He quoted Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I can not see this as healthy at all.

While I find this entire phenomena fascinating, it holds no interest to me what so ever. I can not help but think of the movie Wall-E. I can’t recall the entire story line but the people were stuck in chairs with computers in front of them. The people were completely obese and could not even walk, they got around on moveable chairs. I know this is a great exaggeration of becoming obsessed with the on-line world, it does have it’s point on living a physically sedentary life.
I also think that I like the human side of life.
I am in Boise, Idaho where HP, Hewlet Packard, is located. I was able to talk to a executive about Second Life and the business aspect. He said two years ago that the Vice President of the company held a meeting and said that Second Life was going to be come one of the biggest things on the internet. He wanted everyone to get an account with Second Life to look into how HP could take advantage of the business aspect and opportunities. Within one year it was completely shut down as the majority of the computers were full of porn. He said that the porn on Second Life was really the biggest thing and everyone was on it.
It is sad that a great product can be ruined or taken over by the bad stuff.
For me, I enjoy the human side too much in the real world.