Our progress with Second Llife!!!

As we were trying to set up a Second Life account we hit a problem they wanted us to provide some form of identity, for example a passport or driving licence number. As we were all not prepared to input our own personal information we thought we would never be able to create an avatar on Second Life. Then we tried putting in anything and after the third try of putting in random letters and digits one was accepted. A message immediately appeared saying our information had been checked alongside government records and we have been accepted to join Second Life.

This made us question the website and our level of trust in it decreased. Obviously there wasn't any government checks on our 'passport number' as the message saying that we had been accepted had appeared in a matter of seconds and it was indeed a fake. This made us question how many users have done the same as us and if they would actually use the money from the premium accounts to actually carry ouy these checks. I doubt it, it would appear to me that Second Life's main objective is to profit from the people who feel they are getting a better account.

We need to download some stuff which we are unable to do on the computers in uni so we are going to carry this on at home, setting up the chartacter we want to have. We have also created a facebook group for this assignment where we will log our progress and hopefully meetings and conversations on Second Life so each member of the group will be aware what we have been doing there and the personality of our character will therefore not change.

Our own Second Life!!!

After watching Wonderland we thought it would be a good case study to set up our own character on Second Life to get a better insight into this different life. We have decided we will all spend an hour individually on second life attempting to form relationships and learning more about this different world. We are also seperately setting about finging statistics on online relationships to put into our project.

Our idea!!!

Our idea was founded after watching a documentay called 'Wonderland - Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love' on BBC2 on Wednesday 30th January at 9.50pm. This covered the relationship between two people online, a married woman from America and a single man from England. Carolyn would spend 14 hours a night on the Second Life website even banishing her husband from the bedroom so she could continue using it late into the night. Second Life offers their members the chance to live however they want, which Carolyn sees as a better world than the real one. Even computer versions of themselves, or avatars, tend to be unrealistic as they are phsyically perfect and can do whatever they want. In Carolyn's case this involved having sex with an avatar from London. Carolyn's husband Lee even stood by her when she travelled to London to meet her virtual lover and see if they had a future in real life. They didn't and she soon returned home where her husband was waiting for her.