Natural Oversight

The most noticeably prolific plants on the virtual landscape of Second Life these days are commonly known as ad farms. A sixteen square meter block of virtual land, which is the smallest possible subdivision in SL, supports three primitives. Three large, sometimes spinning, sometimes flashing, textured prims floating over the landscape is just enough to mar the "natural" view and force neighbors to consider paying what amount to extortion fees to end the madness.

Observing the process of various farmers trading these tiny parcels for ever increasing sums is quite fascinating up to the point that one has to consider, at thousands of lindens each, that they've priced themselves completely out of a realistic market and will end up eating crow. Another option, of course, is that they can afford the tier, using real life funds, and simply enjoy watching people squirm. This is hardly a new phenomenon in the human condition or the virtual ether. Ad farms have existed on the WWW for decades as whole groups of domains were scooped by such entrepreneurs as Rick Schwartz, routed to profit sharing advertising websites, and individually sold for premium profits. They've even discovered a way to kite the system. The difference is that, on the web, these sites only appear on our pages if we mistype a domain or forget to activate our popup blocker; we have built the tools to avoid the intrusion.

Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Lab, states in a BBC interview: "Virtual worlds are inherently comprehensible to us in a way that the web is not...They look like the world we already know and take advantage of our ability to remember and organise...Equally important, he said, was the visibility or presence that being in a virtual world bestows on its users. By contrast, he said, when visiting a website people are anonymous and invisible. Shopping on Amazon might be much easier and enjoyable if you could turn to one of the other 10,000 or so people on the site at the same time as you and ask about what they were buying, get recommendations and swap good or bad experiences." I'll contend that virtual 3D Amazon might not be much easier and enjoyable if its landscape were consistently covered with thousands of odd, imposing advertisement prims. If it's Amazon's responsibility to police such "collaborative efforts" in their virtual space, then it's equally Linden Lab's responsibility to do so on their Mainland estate in Second Life.

Mr. Rosedale also expresses, "Second Life is an alternate existence, built by its residents, that strives to be better than the physical world." True, however, the compelling collaborative visible environment Second Life affords also supports ad farms in our faces with no tools or allowable recourse available for us to employee in our efforts to help build this better world. Collaboration is both an additive and subtractive process. So far, Linden Lab has only granted Second Life participants the former ability resulting in, using Mr. Rosedale's terminology, not a better world, not even a truly collaborative one.