Time magazine on Second Life

Time Magazine recently ran a piece on five of the worst websites that mentioned Second Life as one of them. Not entirely sure why – since Second Life isn’t a website, but the article begins:

We’re sure that somebody out there is enjoying Second Life, but why?

and ends,

The corporate world’s embrace of the place as a venue for staff meetings and training sessions does seem to lend Second Life a layer of legitimacy. But maybe it’s a case of some CEOs trying too hard to be hip. 

Ouch.

But perhaps it’s time we recognised Second Life for what it is – (yet another) software platform that fails to leverage virtual reality for serious purposes and also that it has only hitherto been propped up by a multimedia marketing campaign that now shows signs of failing.

And yet there are still some of us who will continue to think that Second Life actually provides scope for more meaningful interactions to take place, say in the world of public diplomacy, peacebuilding or political activism. I’m not entirely convinced, but I would like to believe that perhaps Second Life is ahead of its time. What’s cool today is augmented reality on mobile devices, which seem to hold far more potential in my mind than virtual reality on PCs.

The problem with mobile phones that grab our attention

Our opportunity: remembering to find the OFF switch on our devices, now and then, and tune in to the present with engaged attention.

I believe attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries or alter it with pharmaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.

Linda Stone’s recent post, Fine Dining with Mobile Phones is deeply instructive for the design of ICT mechanisms for peacebuilding and is linked to a post by Ken Yamosh I pointed to in 2007.

For example, the series of ads for the Blackberry shown on Sri Lankan TV (done in India I believe) give the impression that one has more time for family and leisure when one gets a Blackberry. Not so. You become a hostage to work and what is more, raise expectations of quick responses even on weekends and at night. When these expectations are unmet, frustration builds up along with stress to meet them in the future.

Problem is, switching off is easier said than done.

Questions on e-voting in the US: Chads redux?

Recent debates on the nature of Hillary Clinton’s narrow victory over Obama in New Hampshire centre on e-voting irregularities. These debates are as important today as the issue of chads and the election of George Bush in 2000. The big difference is that chads were counted manually. E-voting is registered and counted eletronically.As Jon Stokes notes in an interesting article on this issue on Ars Tecnica,

New Hampshire does not have the manual audit requirement that is necessary to prove that an election was fair, so that state’s ballots were effectively counted in secret by closed-source machine code

he goes on to say that,

“From my perspective, this is what’s really at stake in the ongoing e-voting controversy: the government’s inability to fulfill its obligation to prove to the public that our elections are fair makes our democracy so much more fragile, and so much more susceptible to cracking under the shock of a major election controversy.”

The point is that ICTs in and of themselves don’t contribute to public confidence in elections results and the electoral process when embedded in mechanisms not open to public scrutiny.

I hope Man of the Year was not a prescient script for the US elections!