MediaShift . Reuters Closes Second Life Bureau, but (Virtual) Life Goes On | PBS - 0 views
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How did the media go wrong in coverage -- and participation -- in SSL, and what went right? It was a typical hype-and-backlash scenario, as I detailed in a previous post on MediaShift. Some journalists simply tired of SL, as so many people tried it and then bailed because of its steep learning curve and high technological requirements. But the journalists that have been more enmeshed within the world have been rewarded with plenty of cultural and sociological (and yes, business) stories.
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John Lester leads customer market development for education and health care for Linden Lab, which runs Second Life. I met him in-world and had an instant-messaging chat with his alter-ego, Pathfinder Linden, about how the media has covered SL over the years. My SL name was Lynx Wickentower: Lynx: Did media miss the bigger story of Second Life? Pathfinder Linden at the educational meeting in SL Pathfinder: That seems to be a typical pattern for the human species, yes? We did it with all the previous mediums. We'll do it again in the future. We always misunderstand new mediums, initially treating them like pre-existing ones (e.g., treating the web like print media; treating television like radio). But then we learn new ways of seeing the tools and new ways to leverage them.
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As for Reuters' coverage of SL, they did better than most journalists who did drive-by stories with a day or two of research in-world. The bureau lived for more than two years. Still, James Wagner Au, who writes the excellent New World Notes blog about SL said they could have done better. "Their writers, Adam Pasick and Eric Krangel, are fine journalists, and did some great external business-oriented reports, but at the same time, I don't think they were ever passionately engaged in the medium or Second Life's community on an experiential level," Au told me. "Consequently, their reporting very much had a distanced, 'outside looking in' flavor that caused them to often miss the big picture, in my opinion."
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