Virtual Relativity
The importance of icons for memory
In 2009 I either pioneered a big idea or just gave a new name to an old (and maybe trivial) concept. You be the judge.
The backdrop to this story is important. For the past few years I’d been immersed in the hype of virtual worlds, first as the Evangelist for Second Life and more recently, as the CEO of Millions of Us, an agency that built VR experiences for entertainment companies and brands. Our timing at Millions of Us had been excellent — almost overnight we were creating content for many of the biggest companies in the world.
Hype is a weird phenomenon and one that I’d previously only seen from the outside looking in. In this case, I’d participated in the creation of the story and watched as the idea of Second Life sparked the media’s attention. The first stories evaluated Second Life as a game and generally concluded that it wasn’t a very good one.
What appealed to a broader audience was the novelty of a digital world built by its inhabitants. This change in positioning was apparently cemented at a board meeting, during a long discussion about slow growth and the platform’s lack of appeal. Second Life had been left running on a computer in the back of the conference room. Having reached no conclusion, the board members paused and noticed that while they’d been debating in circles the residents had built something fantastical. Second Life wasn’t the product — the residents were.
Nobody understood this better than VP of Marketing Robin Harper, Director of PR Catherine Smith and their team— rather than “positioning” they “observed” and “helped” interesting people and groups. They hired journalist Wagner James Au to write New World Notes, a blog/newspaper chronicling the development of the culture and society. Then, and only then, they would introduce the press to people with compelling and poignant stories. The homeless woman who used Second Life (while staying warm in a library) to build a castle. With profits earned from this and other projects, she was able to get off the streets. The flywheel caught and the story built on itself — major publications began featuring us daily and within months signups from 50 to 25K per day.
As the story grew, it was clear than people were fascinated at where real life ended and virtual life began. As Evangelist I’d seen this daily — “Can you do x, y or z”? in Second Life — my answer was almost always the same “Yes, if you can do it in Real Life you can do it in Second Life”. (the exceptions were death, having babies and the ability to fly) . Virtual money being convertible to real currency was also baffling to outsiders
As the Virtual DNA idea progressed, I often imagined the cover of the Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s album
Forbes was amazed that the average price of a virtual item was $2.50 with some Snoop Dogg hoodies fetching $100. Our general position was that this made perfect sense given the amount of time kids were spending in virtual worlds it was no different that any digital (or non-digital) item that enabled self-expression and signified high status. But truth be told, I was always amazed that something sounded like sci-fi actually worked.
Why do we humans create celebrities and icons? Other species have similar behavior — bees will show adoration and subservience to an individual who looks a particular way. Studies show that we do something similar — our standards of beauty fluctuate for body type but faces are different — in general we find symmetry attractive. There is a nuance to this however — to achieve facial symmetry one could think of faces as a range of values from 1–10 with each range determining a trait (nose length, cheekbone height, etc.) Ironically, the average of all these values for each trait produces a face that is considered not average but very attractive
Digital Dna — compare the phenomenon to that feeling you get walking through a crowed and see a familiar face. Is it someone you know or maybe just a composite set of traits — the flush of the cheeks, a hairline or similar gait.
Perhaps this is part of the function of celebrities
