Second Life and Disruptive Technologies

Second Life and Disruptive Technologies

Second Life (SL) is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab that launched on June 23, 2003, and is accessible on the internet. A free client program called the Viewer enables its users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world (which residents refer to as "the grid"). Second Life is for people aged 18 and over, while Teen Second Life is for people aged 13 to 17.

Second Life is a disruptive technology I because it disrupts an entire industry or market, throwing them into disarray and often into panic. In one sense it seems to be a largely generational increment on virtual worlds both graphical and text-based of the past that provided one form or another of user-created content and scripting. This would, on the surface, qualify it as a sustaining technology.
Second life is a disruptive technology that might displace the normal evolutionary life cycle of technology. Second life might be around for another twenty years due to people wanting to live in a fantasy land an escape the realities of life. The social benefits of second life are to meet new and interesting people that one might not ordinarily come in contact with.

Social implications of virtual worlds in education might enhance learning as a final way of creating a learning experience to allow users to construct and experience their own abstract worlds, giving them firsthand experience in the transfer of two dimensional knowledge into three dimensional knowledge.


References:

http://www.massively.com/2008/07/07/mitch-kapors-sl5-keynote-and-the-linden-prize/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life
http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet11/moore.html