To quote from Clay's post:
Someone who tries a social service once and bails isn't really a user any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer.I'd have to agree, and I would add:
Someone who tries *anything* once and bails isn't really a *reporter, writer, consultant or teacher* any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer.So Clay and I conceptually agree about what it means to have some credibility, but there is where it stops.
Today is an odd day - I disagree with Clay Shirky and agree *in prinicple* with Prokofy Neva who obviously stayed up much later than I did last night crafting a response to Clay's "petulant dismissal of Second Life". Prokofy and I do not share the same perspective on a number of issues, such as conspiracy and insider theories, but we share a resoundingly common perspective from this well written vantage:
Shirky's essay doesn't even have to be long on real field-tested analysis (I've never heard of him even coming to Second Life; he doesn't appeared to have glanced at the economics stats page); it's enough for him, with his street cred, to begin whining about all the huge hype. I'm a big debunker of the hype, too. Yet the spirit of what is happening in Second Life is being missed in the welter of analysis about fake sign-up numbers and cludgy technology.
The fact is that Second Life represents a new form of emotional bandwidth, as Pathfinder Linden and others have called it, that indicates new forms of communication that might become a medium as well as a message: not that we are all one with hands across the sea -- that is so last century, which was actually chock-full of genocides -- but that even with our very real and deep differences, we can communicate *better* through shared expression, building, projects, and interactivity outside the boundaries of space, time, physical appearance, and even race or gender.
I could not have said it better, but that is where our alignment ends. The fact is, Second Life is an example of a rich environment where everyone can benefit, even the "tekkies" as Prokofy calls them, as well as every archetype outlined by Henrik Bennetsen.
Share Some Grace:
