As I was trying to gain some insight on the issue of Second Life Culture earlier this week, the long-standing “Augmentation vs. Immersion” paradigm kept nagging at me. It’s another Second Life topic that is plagued by ambiguous terms that often confuse more than clarify the underlying issues.
As a good Venn Buddhist and VizThinker, I thought through the concept using a chart. One axis reflects the number of human identity-centric relationships and business dealings. The other is for one’s avatar identity-centric activities.
This ended up providing four quadrants that I propose as replacements for Augmentation and Immersion:
- Anthropic: Their Second Life activity is related to human identity. RL identity is in their SL profile. They use Second Life within their RL job, interact with their human friends within the virtual world, etc.
- Avatarian: Their Second Life activity is separated from human identity. They do not openly associate their avatar and human identities in any way.
- Multiplist: They have a mix of human-centric and avatar-centric relationships and activities within Second Life.
- Dabbler. Just to fill out the chart, I labeled the quadrant of those with very few relationships and activities of any kind.
So I offer “Anthropic vs. Avatarian” to replace “Augmentation vs. Immersion”. What do you think?
