The Alphaville Herald

Time Lapse

by prokofy on 25/10/06 at 11:48 am

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Flak-Catching

Time and date stamp on the press release I received from Hank Hoodoo in Counting Sheep, the market messaging group within SL run by the Electric Sheep Company: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 23:14:08 -0700 (PDT)
We’re told to show up between 4 and 8 SLT on Thursday and Friday, October 26-27, to something called the Yahoo Time Capsule sim for “an evening of social building”.

Time and date stamp on the blog about the Yahoo Time Capsule Event posted by Walker Spaight/Mark Wallace at www.3pointD: Wednesday, October 25th, 2006, at 10:09 am Eastern.

While he may have had an early tip, at a record 8 hours time elapsed (he could have been sleeping!), Walker is once again ahead of the intense 24/7 news cycle these days swirling around the Second Life round of hypervents, as one big company after another launches. But is every single fake event news?

Walker tells you that the event is “pretty cool (and Yahoo!’s Web site is cool as well)” — and does (truth in advertising) mention that his blog is sponsored by ESC, too.

Not devoid of criticism of course — Walker is a professional — he also goes on to muse, “Why aren’t there 3D models being included in the time capsule? It’s not a particular failure of vision on Yahoo!’s part; it probably has more to do with the fact that there’s not yet a standard for such objects, nor can you export such information out of Second Life in a way that’s supported by the company and intelligible to other applications. Virtual 3D objects are not yet widely and easily manipulable, as, say, a chunk of html code is, or a jpeg file?”

But the real question is: did this news *happen* yet — and can we separate coverage of these concocted events from the marketing machine trying to pass them off as real news intensely virtual interactive branding experiences?

I don’t know about you, but I find the concept of taking part in a totally pre-fabricated time-capsule event in SL which was manufactured by Yahoo (of all things) doesn’t grab me. They aren’t part of “the community” in any way I can understand, even conceiving of a very fractured, diverse, and burgeoning population. To be sure, many newbies just came in the door thanks to Yahoo’s feature of Second Life on its portal page when Reuters also came in to set up a news bureau…but did anything actually *happen*?

No coherent group of SL residents like the SL History Wiki or even just girls with names like Heather234 landing at the infohub and deciding to record their experience on a bulletin board with 3 girlfriends decided they wanted to conserve SL screenshots for posterity.

And when the event does open up tomorrow, it will be on a sim where only 39 people will get to make the time capsule launch, and they’ll likely be the ESC workers, journalistic hangers-on like Herald reporters, friends of the sim manager, etc. and create an entirely ersatz happening that involves recording SL in a time capsule that 14 years from now will only reveal one thing: the number of people who received and read and acted upon a corporate press release hyping a virtual world.

To be sure, with the island open a day or so, people can troop in dutifully and “interact with the brand” without fearing avatar lag or “you cannot teleport” and “region full” messages.

When you have such an important thing as a time capsule, why the rush? People ought to be given at least 3 days or even 7 days to think about, plan, take screenshots, form groups, and get ready for this Big Event. I remember we prepared for weeks in our little village of Fairport, NY when 1976 came and we had to create a bicentennial time capsule, writing poetry, taking pictures, bringing mementos. SL’s residents deserve at least the same amount of emotional depth and involvement for an experience like this.

According to the Yahoo site – which has this time capsule available for the entire Internet BTW, not just this SL event — you have 14 days left to contribute. So plan your contribution from Second Life and make it — without being corralled into a fake corporate-sponsored hype on a marketing company’s island in SL.