When a virtual journalist for a virtual newspaper reporting on the digital world ofan online game lands on the real-world front page of the New York Times, it just might signal thedawn of a new era. Virtual journalist Peter Ludlow was banned from The Sims Online for being a bittoo good at his job--for reporting in his virtual tabloid The Alphaville Herald on thecyber-brothels, crimes, and strong-arm tactics that had become rife in the game--and when the Times,the BBC, CNN, and other media outlets covered the story, users all over the Internet called thebanning censorship. Seeking a new virtual home, Ludlow moved the Herald to another virtualworld--the powerful online environment of Second Life--just as it was about the explode onto theinternational mediascape and usher in the next iteration of the Internet. In The Second Life Herald,Ludlow and his colleague Mark Wallace take us behind the scenes of the Herald as they report on theemergence of a fascinating universe of virtual spaces that will become the next generation of theWorld Wide Web: a 3-D environment that provides richer, more expressive interactions than the Web weknow today. In 1992, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson imagined "the Metaverse," avirtual space that we would enter via the Internet and in which we would conduct important parts ofour daily lives. According to Ludlow and Wallace, that future is coming sooner than we may think.They chronicle its chaotic, exhilarating, frightening birth, including the issue that the mainstreammedia often ignore: conflicts across the client-server divide over who should write the lawsgoverning virtual worlds. Peter Ludlow, Professor of Philosophy and James B. and Grace J. NelsonFellow at the University of Michigan, is the author of Semantics, Tense, and Time: An Essay in theMetaphysics of Natural Language (MIT Press, 1999), among other books, and the editor of CryptoAnarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (MIT Press, 2001) and High Noon on the Electronic Frontier(MIT Press, 1996). A freelance journalist, Mark Wallace has written widely on virtual worlds andonline games for a variety of publications, including Wired and The New York Times. He is the editorof leading metaverse blog 3pointD.com, and an author of Second Life: The Official Guide.
It shouldn't be a surprise that the online virtual communities like Second Life-where, recently, the how's and why's of having a "unicorn baby" were all the rage-have their own virtual newspapers and blogs. The very real world constraints such organs have come under, however, may surprise more than a few readers. University of Michigan philosophy professor Peter Ludlow has written and edited various monographs on language and cyberspace; under the name of his online avatar, Urizenus Sklar, Ludlow muckraked within The Sims Online community and was later publisher of SL's The Second Life Herald. He here teams with freelance journalist Wallace, who has had his own adventures covering online virtual communities, to give a blow-by-blow account of how Urizenus Sklar's writings caused a big stir online, with ramifications that are still unfolding. With wit and a real sense of suspense, the two dramatize the "killing" of Urizenus ("Uri") in late 2003, and then work backwards, giving a history of online multiuser environments, providing a vivid sense of what it is to participate in them, detailing the larger forces at work in the conflicts that killed Urizenus, and urgently raising still-very-unresolved issues about law, censorship and cyberspace. Anyone with even the slightest curiosity about online virtual communities will find it engrossing.
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