What is an Authentic Second Life?

May 5, 2019
5 min read

Authenticity, living your truth, kindness - these are necessary virtues.

Merle Dandridge

Second Life is often criticised as being inauthentic, you hear; “I don’t like Second Life because everyone seems so false”. Think about that for a second, what do they mean by false?

At the end of the day, Second Life is very much a kind of social media and as such qualifies for the debate around authenticity on line. The question which is often posed relative to this subject is; on line or inworld, can we really be truly authentic? Or are we all just faking it?

Social media use is more than widespread, in a report by Simon Kemp in January 2018 he suggests that over half the world’s population is now online, that’s more than four billion people! In addition, almost two thirds of the global population own a smartphone. We are constantly connected. Constantly sharing.

One would think that this is a good thing however, Mental Health problems on the increase, we seem to be more stressed and agitated than ever before. Increasingly, younger people are becoming anxious and stressed. There’s a pressure that’s mounting.

Social media thrived on the concept of “the fear of missing out” it seems now that this progressive stress results in more people with feelings of inadequacies. All our experiences are under constant scrutiny, experiences are increasingly to address our need for likes and comments and not for joy or learning.

But does this ever-growing cultural behemoth make us less authentic? I’d argue no, not really. When you consider the alternative or what we did as human beings before social media, i.e. actually meet face to face and actually talk to one another we would often do it with a different face. The way we communicate at work is with a very different face to the one we wear with our friends and family, it’s not a conscious thing, it’s a human nature thing, different masks for different situations. Does that make us any less real? Does that make us less authentic?

In fact, I don’t see my presence, my interactions in Second Life as separate to who I am in life generally. My avatar is simply a virtual extension of that. Just as we put on our best face for meeting friends at a dinner party, or going to meeting at work, we also put on our best face for social media or in this case for Second Life.

Second Life is often criticised as being inauthentic, why do we criticise it in such a way when we don’t expect the same level of real-ness from the other social interactions in our lives?

We, as a society, need to recognise that social media, in this case Second Life, only represents a small representation of who an individual really is. We need to learn how to read between the lines. We need to accept that we are only seeing a snapshot of that individuals’ personality. And you know what, that’s ok!

If you went to an event to meet new people, you wouldn’t expect to know everything and anything about them. You wouldn’t accuse them of misleading you about who they are by not revealing every little detail of their lives. Relationships in SL, romantic or not are often criticised as for being instant, let’s think about that a second. When you meet someone in world, people often make a judgement based initially on looks and then after an initial introduction, on a brief conversation. How is that different than the start of relationships in real life?

People don’t need to share everything about themselves in Second Life in a matter of minutes in order to be authentic.

We are deep, complex beings. We do not have the mental bandwidth to untangle that all in order to communicate it with other people in world.

If we bring this back to Second Life as a kind of social media, the flip side of this complexity to our being is that we are trying to fathom how to live in a world of constant connectivity. And therein lies the problem, in my humble opinion…… connectivity itself. I actually think that we are too connected, and we need to give ourselves a well-earned break!

It’s not Second Life itself that’s the problem, it’s how we use it, how we understand it, how we harness the positive in it. As new citizens of Second Life, in the very early days, we are all jumping in fully clothed with no armbands. Some of us quickly learn to swim, some of us are drowning. It can a bit overwhelming.

We need to figure out how to live a healthy and fulfilling Second Life and yes, it is possible.

I mean, think about, we’ve had thousands of years of human interaction. The social structures we’ve created as living beings took time to shape and pass on to the next generation. Social relationships aren’t necessarily a natural instinct. There are social codes and rules that take time to learn. We are taught them as we develop, through trial and error, or guidance. Surely it follows that a whole new concept, a whole new world where good communication is key is going to fraught with issues as we figure out how to manage it best as a virtual but real society?

I don’t think that sharing just your best bits online makes you less authentic than somebody who wants to share warts and all, if you choose to tell me about the time you got a drunk as a skunk and fell over a bollard in the street on the way home, that’s fine, equally, if you choose not to tell me about that, that’s fine, although it would have been a fab ice breaker. Just as in real life encounters you will find some people more private and others big on the sharing, it’s not that some people don’t want to share everything, they just choose to share what makes them comfortable and that is also fine. So, if you’re not comfortable with not knowing every minutia of someone’s life, real or second, get over yourself or even better, go someplace else.

And that brings me back to my main point, authenticity is what YOU choose it to be. As an individual, you get to decide how you present yourself publicly. You get to decide how to manage your relationships both in real life and in second. You get to decide what authenticity means to you. You decide what it means to be authentic in world.

Of course, some people make mistakes. Some people are downright misleading, unscrupulous and pathological liars. But hey, that’s life. That is what we know and expect from some human beings, so don’t be surprised. It’s hard in a virtual world however, to live a fulfilling and happy Second Life we need to look, listen and learn how to read those often subtle social cues.

The only person you can control is yourself. You cannot be responsible for the behaviour of others. But you can be responsible for how you react to them. Be nice!

Be your authentic self, whatever that looks like in your own mind. And remember that somebody else’s idea of authenticity is probably a little different to yours!

What’s on this week?