Have had two great interviews this week - one with Lowell Cremorne, the editor of the Metaverse Journal and aussie virtual worlds new site and one with Pixeleen Mistral, the editrix of the SL Herald. Two quite different perspectives, and both very informative!
For those who are passing by this blog and who don't think they'll be able to sit down and chat one-on-one with me, these are the kinds of questions which I'm asking my interview subjects. Please feel free to comment or provide some answers:
- How do you *do* journalism in SL? How is it different from traditional journalism?
- What role does journalism perform in SL?
- What kind of interaction with readers do most media have? Can readers comment on stories and do these comments provide a kind of 'public sphere' function?
- How does Linden Lab govern SL?
- Do residents bring expectations of rights and/or obligations with them into SL?
- How does Linden Lab communicate with residents?
- What happened in the so-called 'Banking Ban' event? Did public opinion or journalism play a role in that decision?
- Which is more pertinent to Linden Lab: real life media or second life media?
1 comment:
Before you even begin asking these questions, you first must ask yourself: which side am I on?
And if you reply, "Oh, but I'm an unbiased observer, above it all, merely researching this phenomenon," then ask yourself how *that* role of the supposed sophisticated, over-educated, holier-than-thou "observer" in fact winds up taking sides. Taking sides either with the company Linden Lab, or taking sides with those journalists you self-identity with, whether it be Reuters, which you feel is more "real life" and therefore "less biased," or whether you happen to pick some scrappy little independent paper writing on art experiment -- or whatever your personal tastes are, coming from your class, your nationality, your politics, etc.
And I don't mean to be a typical college deconstructivist here; I'm trying to force you to examine your biases well in advance. If you have to ask a question like "how do you do journalism?" then...you must never have attempted to do journalism in a closed society.
You do journalism the same way everywhere, but in a closed society, whether it's Iraq or Russia or Second Life, there are certain dynamics that are in play -- forces that are engaging more than usual in propagandizing and obfuscating, and the role of the tabloid, willing to risk floating and pursuing rumours and challenging the powers that be becomes more and more important.
We're in such a situation in SL -- a closed society, run by one company, a kind of company town, with many people operating with a kind of suspended disbelief, that this company is merely making a neutral tool, and they can do all sorts of "progressive" things within it like hold critical discussions about McCain or a Daily Kos conference, so that they never examine how the platform may be driving them to those sorts of activities and discouraging others.
In fact, Linden Lab practices a heavy-handed and vicious censorship policy, permabanning anyone from the forums who challenges any of their "FIC" (the class of favourites, the Feted Inner Core, a term I coined) or anyone in their orbit whom they need for maintaining power and influence. To this they have added that if you fall afoul of the rules on the forums and get a permaban, you will be banned inworld permanently too. That means all your property and belongings will be confiscated -- indeed draconian punishment for speech.
The blogosphere has steadily grown more contracted, as most sites cannot tolerate unmoderated comments because of the huge factor for griefing, stalking, harassment given the enormously dramatic and vindictive sentiments that develop around SL, which is a place without a rule of law, without an internal free mass media that can report accurately, so that people have no recourse but to "try in the media" issues like copyright theft, destruction of business reputation, Linden policies that people vehemently disagree over, etc.
I am one of the few blogs that has unmoderated comments, that is, people are free to post. I have a simple rule that you must use a recognizable SL name or RL name or bloggers' name, and most people keep to that. I was forced to develop that policy after I began to be harassed personally at home, and suffer constant stalking into my real life, by anonymous griefers with all sorts of axes to grind or who simply maliciously enjoy other's suffering.
One open forums with a no-holds-barred policy, Second Citizen, was closed, it was maintained as a third-party site, as indeed any attempt at free media or commentary has to be, due to draconian LL limitations on speech on the official forums and blogs (I've been banned from both, as have many other outspoken critics).
But SC eventually was forced to close due to the really horrendous bad behaviour of some of the trolls there, stalking into RL, threatening RL harm, etc. The remaining major forum, Sluniverse.com has responded to these problems with overkill, banning people left and right when they feel they can't control their speech sufficiently.
Read the comments in the Herald, which his now also moderated, and moderated selectively usually to remove comments critical of the authors and challenging their constant bias toward destructive griefers. The Herald was the one truly independent newspaper that wasn't a creature of Linden Lab or any of its sycophants or power groupings, but it lost the public trust by constantly siding with the miscreants it was reporting on, i.e. b/tards, w-hats, etc. the major griefing groups. The Herald has also followed a formula of "make the news, then cover it". I used to write for the Herald; I've recently asked to withdraw my name from the masthead.
Readers around SL blogs and newspapers have an intensive appetite -- so they imagine -- for what THEY think of as "professional journalism". They constantly, viciously, repeatedly, nastily tell writers they are "not professional" and should "be more factual". But any outside observer would quickly see that what these anonymous and unaccountable reader/commentators mean is that the reporters aren't placating them, aren't playing to their sentiments, aren't feeding them what they want to hear. It's pretty awful stuff. I don't think any magic power needs to be conferred on hordes of commentators to somehow reach objectivity through sheer multiplicity. Instead, they merely become a propagandized mob in a situation like the Herald.
A question like "how does LL govern SL" is too large. You have a lot of homework to be doing, read up on it using Google.
And you shouldn't be asking basic questions like "How does LL communicate?" which are answered by going to the website and seeing how they do that and also reading critics of their policies like me or others.
Blogs and papers like the Herald reported on the financial fraud for years, and customers complained constantly, but LL did little to respond.
After the U.S. gambling ban was put into effect, they acquired more spine on this because they had to ban gambling, and then soon after, they realized they also had to ban banks, that had benefited primarily from gambling, and were the way that the gambling industry was laundering its money into and out of the rest of the economy. No big mystery there.
The banking ban was hastened along by having one very vocal attorney, Benjamin Duranske, with a very big agenda to elevate himself and his profession as "necessary" to corporations doing business in the "wild west of SL" began to call for prosecution of various banks and high-yield investment plans, without, of course, any normal due process, any prosecutor or judge from real life involved, no attorneys to defend those charged, etc. He was able, just by hollering a lot, to get mainstream media to follow the scandal and burnish his own reputation as a "crusader" into the bargain.
Yet he never took up the case of any actual litigant or any actual victim. He never came up with the facts. Nobody did. The law of discovery was never allowed to play out. There was definitely fraud in SL, and it definitely needed to be pursued by real life legal authorities, but if anything, Duranske's scandalizing precluded this, and opened up serious problems for due process and the rule of law, turning into a "rule of lawyers".
Public opinion and journalism never really got a chance to operate; what you saw was one blogger, Duranske, taking the law into his hands, and using his RL credentials (he had gotten himself into an ABA sub-committee by that time) to get media attention which spiralled. No justice was ever done, however, and some of these same characters continue to operate or moved to OpenSim where there is less regulation. So sure, you can write the pat sort of analysis that, gee whiz,"one brave blogger" was able to get attention to this, but his motives were mixed, his results nil, and neither law or journalism were advanced. That's why you really need to take more than a superficial look at all this.
Real life media is more important to the lab because no SL blog or newspaper has anywhere near the reach of a RL newspaper or magazine. LL makes some effort to co-opt the blogs or covertly threaten them or suck up to them now and then, but by and large its PR machine is focused on RL media spin.
I didn't agree to do your interview because I feel you have a lot more homework to do on this topic to be conversant in it. I also am tired of being viewed as a non-serious toy in a game play-acting a role, which is how a number of people studying media (and you aren't the first) have approached this topic.
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