Literature comes to Second Life

July 1, 2007

In recent months there's been a heck of a lot of reporting on Second Life (SL), the three-dimensional immersive online environment where users choose a name and appearance for their character, who then walks around and talks to the others and builds digital objects and lives on islands and goes to night clubs. And stuff. Whether or not you've experienced any of this, it's worth noting that more and more media is happening there-- some of it brought over from real life (or RL, as users call it), and some unique to the unusual place many people consider a second home.

Last summer Suzanne Vega was the first of several major recording artists to give a concert "in-world." She was represented, as are all users in SL, by a 3-D animation called an avatar as she played her guitar and sang, sending a live music stream that online attendees could hear through their computers.

Literature is popping up there, too--not just in retail-enabled bookstores but, as I discovered, in the writing of actual users.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the writing I came across in Second Life contains at least some element of fantasy or science fiction. Many stories and poems are about or set in SL, a surreal place where avatars can fly and teleport from one location to another.

Once in SL users can communicate with each other in a number of ways, including instant messaging. IM turns out to be a good way to share short pieces, like poems. When a group of avatars have assembled in, say, the Blue Angel Poets' Dive, they can walk up to the mic and perform a poem via chat to the whole group at once. Audio streaming allows for live readings, too, which function similarly to the concerts. In March Dean Koontz read an excerpt from his upcoming novel *The Good Guy* in a bookstore in SL.

In my online roaming I met dedicated Second Lifer Steve Schrum, who in RL teaches theater at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, and who recently created an anthology of SL poetry. Shortly after joining SL as Phorkyad Acropolis, Schrum discovered Shakespeare and Company, a building designed by another user to look like the famous bookstore in Paris. He went in and sat down.

"People were typing in lines of their poems, and other people were listening and responding," Schrum told me in a phone interview. He'd walked in on a poetry reading. That time he just listened, but at his next reading he shared something he'd written himself.

"My SL poetry experiences led me to think of myself as a poet where I really hadn't before," Schrum said. "There was an artist there from New York who thought I was a ‘real' poet. Suddenly people were thinking of me as a poet in my second life."

He may have been a newbie to poetry, but Schrum has long been experimenting with literature on the Internet, including writing a play for a MUD, or text-based multi-user domain.

"Years ago I likened online communication to mask work in an acting class," Schrum said, explaining that people often feel free to behave or even write differently when they've adopted a different identity. (That would explain the gambling and sex that go on there. Consider yourself warned.)

Within SL, Schrum's anthology, called *The Absence of Shadows*, is a digital object that looks like a book. I joined him there and was able to read the poems by touching the image, which made paper-rustling sounds as the page turned. The book was originally programmed by another user and customized by Schrum, who put out a call for submissions, collected the poems and then uploaded the images to the book.

Phorkyad promotes the book in-world by placing ads in SL media--including the *SL Enquirer* and the streaming radio station KONA Radio--and by throwing a release party. *The Absence of Shadows* also exists as a flesh-and-blood--er, pulp-and-ink--book, available for purchase at the print-on-demand site cafepress.com.

So if there are books in Second Life, there ought to be libraries. And schools. Right?

Yep. The American Library Association has been there since March, and educators are there in full force. For the next installment of DigitaLit I'll visit an SL college classroom and a library exhibit. But first I think I'll go for a walk.

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