With a click of the mouse button, I am born. A faceless, gray-skinned nude, as stiff and generic as a tailor’s dress form — this female is too infantile to possess any unique features just yet. But slowly, as some far-off mother server labors to communicate with my computer’s silicon brain through miles of venous Ethernet cable, my pixilated body begins to develop color, clothes, and the rudimentary signs of an individual personality.

I have created a character in Second Life, the hottest virtual environment in cyberspace. As with many online video games, each Second Life user has an avatar, a computer animated character that represents him or her in the virtual three-dimensional space. Tapping a key or clicking the mouse allows the avatar to tour a world of exciting simulated settings — lush tropical islands, sumptuous shopping malls, sleek museums, and pulsating discotheques.

More importantly, Second Life introduces the user to a multitude of eclectic characters — the jean-clad millionaire real-estate trader, the sassy barhopping science museum curator, the cutting-edge virtual commodities designer, the speech communications professor who attends professional meetings dressed as a dragon — all steered by real-world people who may or may not have something in common with their virtual counterparts.

As a brand new “resident,” before I can enjoy all that Second Life has to offer, I must learn to use its interface. My alter ego wanders toddler-like and confused through the virtual Garden of Eden, a “learning island” designed for receiving and educating novices. I am given temporary clothing, taught a few elementary navigation and communication techniques, and allowed to practice my new, shaky skills on fellow freshmen.

At the “chat” training station, a large parrot teaches me to type what I want to “say” so that others can “hear” my text. A man, the virtual avatar of a real person, approaches me and asks me if I am new here. Wanting to respond in my real-world friendliness, I type “It’s my first day,” unaware that I have not toggled into chat mode. Instead of speaking my very first sentence, my keystrokes send my avatar rocketing upwards. Dizzy from the realistic simulation of being suspended a couple hundred feet in midair, it takes me a moment to realize that I have accidentally typed the “fly” command. I collect myself, drop back down to the ground and, flustered, quickly respond, “Obviously.” But, my potential new friend does not see the blushing good humor of my reply. He has interpreted my inept keystroke navigation as a rude put-down. He stomps away in the virtual world. I flush with embarrassment in the real world.

There is a “metaverse” burgeoning in cyberspace — an alternate, virtual universe where everyday people earn a living, recreate, and make friends and enemies, all by means of this three-dimensional version of the World Wide Web. Made public in 2003 by the San Francisco software company Linden Labs, Second Life offers a virtual, online meeting space that looks like a video game but functions like a three-dimensional chat room. Users access the virtual platform by downloading software and connecting with three-dimensional settings and characters through an ordinary internet connection. Within the virtual world, they can purchase virtual land, construct virtual buildings, design virtual clothing, alter their appearance, exchange virtual goods, network at virtual social functions, and even get virtual jobs.

Second Life is a fertile Petri dish for entrepreneurial experimentation. “Residents” can buy virtual money with real money, much as one buys food and ride tickets at a carnival. They can exchange it back at the Second Life Currency Exchange (current rate is about 280 Linden dollars per US dollar). Individuals with practically no startup capital can earn real money selling virtual goods with zero cost for materials. A growing industry revolves around the sale of virtual clothing. Designers with a knack for computer modeling can build virtual sets for promotional projects funded by big-name companies such as Sony, Nike, Toyota, or American Apparel. And with Linden Lab setting the cost of plots of virtual land, modest yet savvy capitalists can become millionaire real-estate moguls whose virtual entrepreneurial genius challenges Donald Trump’s.

As a three-dimensional chat-room, Second Life provides an immense playground for socialization. Whether users already know each other in real life or are looking to meet someone at a singles mixer, they can dance at virtual concerts, chat in virtual bars, or frolic in virtual tropical paradises. Can’t afford a trip to Vegas? Try one of Second Life’s hundreds of casinos. Can’t find a date in real life? Go to a sex club and watch as your avatar acts out pornographic acts with a virtual call girl. Can’t afford the steep entry fees to your local science museum? Go to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s virtual museum and witness simulations of eclipse, hurricanes, and single-celled organisms. If you can imagine it, someone has built it in Second Life.

But, more than just providing a novel medium for entertainment, Second Life and similar software platforms create an increasingly realistic three-dimensional space for telecommunication — a space that outstrips the original World Wide Web in depth, flexibility, interactivity, and verisimilitude. Robin Harper, Linden Lab’s Vice President of Community Development and Support, says that Second Life is home to over one thousand “private islands” that function as corporate intranets or virtual conference spaces for companies such as Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Reuters. About 100 of those islands are owned by educational institutions that use the Second Life platform as a virtual classroom.

A lot of Second Life’s current hype is based on the novelty of having a mostly functional virtual world. As with the World Wide Web, there are acres upon acres of visually unappealing, boring places to visit (e.g. a box that hands out leaflets emblazoned with a business name). As with any cyber-social network, an easy wrong turn can land you in an unsavory den of pornography. And, like at a high-end shopping mall, culturally enriching opportunities are often restricted to the pecuniary motivations of marketing departments (e.g. a scenic drive brought to you by the Toyota Scion xB). Whether the platform draws much of its recent popularity from its relatively inexpensive advertising opportunities or from the safe haven it provides for individuals in search of virtual sex and gambling, it’s clear that Second Life represents the next stage of computer assisted communication — the new email, the affordable video conference, or the new Instant Messenger only with exponentially more tools for expressing ideas. But, what remains to be seen is whether this three-dimensional and interactive world, or its successors, will disintegrate into a sleazy singles scene, become overrun with shameless marketing traps, or evolve into a powerful new communication tool that displaces the Web as the dominant medium for self-presentation and online interaction.

Second Life’s strength — what sets it apart from the World Wide Web — is not just that it is three dimensional. It’s that it is three dimensional and interactive. Like a chat room, you are connected instantly with people from all over the globe. But, instead of monochrome text peppered with the occasional smiling emoticon, you see your interlocutors, watch their gestures, and interact with objects in the virtual environment.

T. Sibley Verbeck, C.E.O. and founder of The Electric Sheep Company, a company that designs and builds virtual spaces says that Second Life, or something like it, will eventually become the new dominant form of online communicating. “It’s a more powerful social experience,” says Verbeck. “You just feel like you are with the other people.”

Verbeck holds up as an example, his company’s real-time recreation of a Boston Red Sox vs. New York Yankees baseball game, enacted virtually in Second Life with avatar players who played concurrently with the real-world game. More than with watching a video of the game and chatting about it in Instant Messenger, the event allowed spectators to get a better sense of position and a better feeling for the layout of the field says Verbeck. “You’re in a crowd of avatars,” he says. The fan avatars were fighting over the ump’s calls, chatting about their lives, watching the field and each other, and interacting. “It felt more than any other medium like being at a real game,” says Verbeck. And, unlike a real game, it cost fans less than $2.

Verbeck’s company functions like a company that builds professional websites for other companies, only it builds places, objects, and events within Second Life. The Electric Sheep Company has built recreational commodities, such as a life-like avatar for pop musician Ben Folds for his virtual concert at Sony BMG’s Media Island stage. But its products also include educational spaces, such as its recreation of downtown Hanover, New Hampshire as part of an emergency response simulator for training first responders at Dartmouth College. Avoiding the expense, hassles, and dangers of carrying out emergency drills on real-world public streets, trainees can steer avatars through virtual recreations of disaster sites in realistic locations.

These virtual products do not come cheap. The cost of material is zero, but the cost of designing and coding can be pretty steep for quality merchandise. The Electric Sheep Company doesn’t work on any project budgeted less than $10,000 says Verbeck. Despite Second Life’s relative newness and its democratic philosophy that content be user generated, its residents set a pretty high standard for content. And that standard is difficult to achieve without an experienced staff. Verbeck admits that right now in Second Life, “there is very little that is both polished and substantial,” but he thinks it will develop soon.

Though reporters and spectators fill almost every chair in the opulent conference room, the scene is silent but for the clicking and whirring of invisible cameras and the piped-in soundtrack of soothing ocean waves. Rich carpets cover the floor, magnificent porcelain-style vases tower on either side of the speaker’s stage, and the mahogany colored panel work of the ceiling is bedecked in diaphanous, pink draperies that billow and sway like jelly fish rocked by a gentle marine current. The rebirthing of avatars who have arrived late in their midair, naked grayness provides only a minor distraction from the purpose at hand — to attend a press conference.

In real life, I am wearing jeans, comfortable tennis shoes, and a worn sweater. I sit at my laptop in a messy office three time zones away from the virtual press conference. While my breathing is labored from a mad dash up flights of stairs, the very moment my laptop computer is illuminated and an internet connection is made, my perfectly coifed and attired avatar is instantly among the other journalists poised to scribble notes. Some reporters have come dressed in business casual attire, while others don more flamboyant garb. A female attendee dressed as Wonder Woman sits on one side of me. A dapper man wearing a derby hat, round spectacles, and a new wave bolo sits on the other.

Like in the real world, attendees of the press conference wait politely for the speaker to finish making her prepared statement before launching into their probing interrogations. However, unlike in the real world, though she sits on a stage in front of a virtual microphone, when the speaker talks, her lips are motionless and she utters no sound. We hear only the soft tapping of a simulated keyboard as her hands mime those of a typists’ at an invisible keyboard. The text scrolls sentence by sentence in real time at the bottom of my computer screen. In the dialogue history box, each person’s statements are handily labeled with his or her name for easy reference should disparate lines of communication interrupt and confuse one another.

The press conference represents both the best and worst of communication through Second Life. As a communication platform, Second Life offers a relatively cheap and easy medium for bringing people together online. Virtual conferences promise much of the feel of a face-to-face encounter with little of the expense or travel time associated with a real meeting and less need of the technological support required for a streaming video conference. Nametags float above heads for easy identification, and participants are only clicks away from browsing a person’s online portfolio, mission statement, and contact information. But, with restrictive and awkward tools for expression through gesture or action and unlimited options for dress and appearance, seemingly minor choices in self-presentation often unintentionally create distracting and confusing statements.

As in the past, when the telephone, email, and cell phones were introduced to society’s pantheon of communication choices, Second Life retains many weaknesses associated with a new medium. Users must overcome technological limitations, such as a difficult user interface, limited bandwidth, out-of-date hardware, server outages, and sometimes malicious virus-like codes that destroy virtual commodities and gum up the virtual works. But surprisingly, many of Second Life’s weaknesses stem from the complicated and often poorly understood psychology of computer-assisted communication.

Robin Harper says that people flock to Second Life because it is “free of constraints.” In Second Life, you can be free from real-world difficulties: disability, gender stereotypes, the complexity of starting a business without materials — even gravity can’t keep you down. “It’s not about escape,” says Harper. “It’s about opportunity.” But, when you get down to it, the ability to be whomever or whatever you want to be in a virtual environment causes problems. This freedom inherently adds a complicating and restrictive dimension to the social psychology of otherwise ordinary interactions in Second Life.

Late one night at The Blue Note jazz bar, after a long, stimulating conversation with a fellow climbing enthusiast about physics, video games, and their favorite sport, Patio Plasma had to delicately reveal to her new friend a little bit about her real life. She was a guy. When Paul Doherty, a wiry physicist with a graying ponytail, first created a character in Second Life, on a lark, he chose to be a woman — a six-foot-two redhead who wears sassy microskirts and punky combat boots. And usually, he doesn’t have to describe to people his real-world self unless he is making plans to meet them in his “First Life.”

Doherty is co-director of the Teacher Institute of San Francisco’s popular science museum, the Exploratorium. His publicly funded organization has spent over $10,000 building a virtual environment that recreates in 3D hands-on science exhibits for online denizens of the Second Life. And, Doherty sees no reason why his feminine alter ego can’t run the show. But, he’s found one unexpected result of being a virtual transvestite — one can’t assume that the social rules of the real world apply in the virtual one. He’s still ironing out the wrinkles in his online persona, such as when to reveal information about one’s real life, or what to wear to a work function (a suit or a hip ensemble that might make Lindsay Lohan envious), or how to identify people when conversing in Second Life (it is taboo to give real-life names, yet confusing to do otherwise).

Because Second Life is not sophisticated enough to recreate the real world exactly, even well intentioned devotees tend to embellish their real-world personas. And because using Second Life for professional rather than recreational pursuits is a relatively new phenomenon, what hasn’t evolved is a collective “life experience” that helps users know when others are being forthright and when they are being deceitful.

My own experience in Second Life was opposite that of Doherty’s. Doherty assumed that in a world where you could change your appearance at whim, appearances didn’t matter. He discovered, however, that real-world cultural perceptions still leak into the virtual world. I went in with a certainty that I would present myself exactly how I am in real life. Only, I found that such a desire is not only difficult to achieve technically, but also outside of the realm of Second Life culture.

When being “conceived” in Second Life, that is, when setting up a character account, users get to choose a name and a temporary appearance for their avatar. As a journalist with an ambition to get to the bottom of the self presentation conundrum, I smugly intended to use only real information. I was disappointed to find that I could not use my real last name but was forced to choose from a list. I became Pearl Ehrlich, named for a population biologist and a feminine first name that kind of rhymed.

Once rendered in the virtual environment as a gray mannequin who eventually grows temporary clothing and features like lichen on a stone, I could find a private space away from the rest of the newly sprouted and work on my “real” appearance. This too turned out to be more challenging than I anticipated. In the appearance menu, there is a toggle bar for every possible physical trait. Height, body thickness, body fatness (I guess there’s a difference), head size, eye shape, ear size, lip width, chin angle, hair color, hair length on the sides of your head, hair length on the top of your head — all these constitute a fraction of the options. I began to see why people purchase ready-made bodies — one could spend hours perfecting the eye-nose-chin ratio. I tried to give myself an arbitrarily generated appearance, but selecting random features concocted a balding, pudgy, freckled woman with tiny eyes, a giant nose and pink hair (what was left of it). I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the black, poofy temporary pony tails that I was “born” with, so for weeks I roamed Second Life with two bad hairdos — and let me tell you, that doesn’t add up to one good hairdo!

In the end, I did feel obligated to sit down and spend two or three hours on my appearance, something I do not do in real life. The result: an aqua-haired, rose-eyed, bulbous-nosed, freckled woman with a wide butt, a high waist, and a powder-puff linebacker’s shoulders. Pearl lets you know she’s a journalist, but she doesn’t advertise her real name unless you ask. She wears large plastic purple beads, makeup that matches her hair color, and a ridiculous pair of purple sandals over knee-high plaid socks. When I’m not controlling her, she stands with her hands on her hips looking approachable but not flirty. She’s nothing like me, but very likely some fantasy self I haven’t admitted to wishing for consciously. My husband says she looks exactly like his ex-girlfriend, and neither of us can figure out what that means.

“Anonymity completely changes human relationships,” says Dmitri Williams, Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It’s not just that anonymity can breed mischief, which it certainly can, but even well meaning people behave differently when their identity is masked. The confusing point about using a virtual environment is that, in their day-to-day interactions in Second Life, people don’t think about how anonymity affects social interactions, when in fact it really matters. “When you get online, you are not doing it in the presence of other people,” says Williams.

In one of the first studies of the psychology of computing, clinical therapists used computers to do initial screenings for patient intake. Even though patients knew that a real person would be reading their responses, patients were more honest “talking” to a computer about their psychiatric problems than they were face-to-face with a therapist. Nick Yee, a doctoral student in Communication at Stanford University, says, “There’s something very stressful about face-to-face interactions.”

Yee studies behavior in collaborative virtual environments, which includes conferencing through laboratory virtual reality stations, platforms like Second Life, and multiplayer online games, such as Everquest, World of Warcraft, and Star Wars Galaxies. He’s found that the video-game structure provides a special type of relationship, rarely obtainable in the real world. There is true anonymity that allows players to escape the consequences of any poor decisions, their interactions transact through a computer that does not convey facial expression, and players are constantly experiencing simulated crises the resolution of which promotes group bonding.

In one of his studies, Yee measured the reaction of subjects to an avatar in a simple virtual environment. Using a headset that measured head tilt, his subjects listened and responded to three virtual characters that presented arguments for or against a university campus security policy. The subjects were more likely to be convinced by the virtual character that mimicked the way the subject tilted his or her head when making an argument than the character that used a different series of head movements to present his or her case. And, the subjects were unaware that they were being mimicked. Yee says that such results are worrisome, because they signal that very simple coding in virtual conferencing environments can deliberately mislead users, convincing them to buy products, endorse views, or vote for someone they otherwise wouldn’t. “If face-morphing could have changed the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, what are analogs of that in virtual environments?” asksYee.

More so than in real life, in the virtual world we as a society have not yet worked out the measures of who to trust and when to trust them. We don’t have decades of experience judging the character of others based on visual and verbal clues in a virtual medium. In Second Life, my persona and the personas of those who I meet can never be exactly what they appear to be. This intrinsic difference between the virtual and actual worlds can cause frustration, confusion, and intoxication. And, until people have learned how to translate their knowledge of real-world social cues into virtual-world social cues, the Second Life platform will never evolve beyond a frivolous, passing trend.

Patio Plasma has sent me, or I should say Pearl, a teleporting card that delivers my avatar to a new exhibit at the science museum — an activity in which Second Life users can discover what they “weigh on Earth.” I have been excited to try it because it will be the first non-visual connection between my real-world self and my avatar’s virtual physical presence. Situated modestly on the second floor of a dark, warehouse-like room and hardly standing out among dozens of learning displays, the virtual scale looks exactly like one you would find in a doctor’s office. It’s not a modern digital scale, but the kind in which the user slides weights along a balanced beam to get the reading.

When I step on the scale, it animates as if it is reading my height with a fold out bar, just as my pediatrician used to do. “Pearl Ehrlich is 108.05 Lbs and 4.93 feet,” says the scale. “I’m short,” I think. And with that one small step onto the virtual scale, I have become one step closer to being in touch with my virtual self. But, who cares how tall you are in a virtual world?

Molly F. Wetterschneider (December 15, 2006)