Final Course Work

My final commentary and thoughts on Second Life and the course were previously completed in my last post.

I have argued throughout this course that Second Life is indeed another culture industry. I still think it is a culture industry as it mimics real life to a large degree. Passive consumption of items in Second Life is a growing phenomenon that allows for the upper-class to become richer. In our final class we discussed why/why not SL was a culture industry and even the points brought up for why it wasn't a culture industry all work for it being one as well. First, one can say that SL is not a culture industry because of the prosumer. You can create (and everything is created by users) items in game yourself, and then sell them, rather than buying. But creating items is limited to a few people who have the knowledge and skills to do so. It is really hard to use the program and create a decent looking object. If you have the artistic ability to even do this, you still need the ability to program through code to allow for the objects to have functions. Therefore, in SL just as in RL, there are limited people who can truly produce. Another argument that was made was that you can be a creative avatar, you don't have to be a human and buy into the goods. The example that was brought up was the KoolAid man, but he is just a walking advertisement, what a great example of the culture industry at work! The other avatars however, such as the fuzzies who have their niche groups in SL might oppose the culture industry. But these groups just allow for a new market to sell to, for this reason SL has its own culture industry as well. One with the same goals as it does in real life, but altered to suit the needs of SL. One can choose to not purchase anything, just like in real life, but this will create alientation in both worlds. For the most part, Second Life is an efficient culture industry that mimics how the real world operates.

All of my thoughts dealing with Second Life at the beginning of the course have not changed, but I wasn't exactly making hypothetical guesses as I have used SL before.