The rise and fall of Second Life. Second Life in the Information Society

Resumen

When Second Life was created in 2003 it proposed a reproduction and recreation of our world in an immaterial universe, which enabled the users to adopt identities far from reality; class, ethnicity and gender were no longer going to be a problem in social relationships conducted in this virtual world. During 2007 and 2008 the popularity of Second Life grew immensely, with a notable increase in participants, an important repercussion in newspapers and academic journals and especially with the introduction, in this virtual environment, of multinationals and institutions that did not want to miss the opportunity of becoming present in the virtual world.

Second Life is therefore a consequence of the Information Society in which we live; however, the development of virtual social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter, that enable the users to connect and build relationships with each other in a space allocated between reality and the virtual world, has undermined the popularity and success of Second Life. Its incapacity to become real has paradoxically been one of the main components of the failure of Second Life together with its inability to compete with fantasy virtual worlds of videogames such as World of Warcraft.