Twisting Around

So the latest build of the popular Emerald Viewer includes a new column in your friends tab--you can now see whether or not anyone has 'clicked you off' i.e., set it so you do not see them come online.

As you can see here, someone's done just that on my flist. (Actually, several have--you can click the eyeball icon and sort by that column).



This isn't any kind of sneaky dirty trick on the part of the Emerald viewer. All it is doing is compiling information that is freely available and supplied by Second Life and showing it to you within the viewer.

A feature that has been a part of Emerald viewer for quite some time is 'show true online status in profile'. Click this, and an Emerald viewer user can see if another user is online regardless of whether they are friends or not.



It may come as a shock, but the cold truth is: there is NO TRUE PRIVACY in Second Life.

None. Nada. Zip. Every resident should realize this.

Short of creating a brand new alt that never ever friends anyone, or joins any groups, or builds anything that will be seen/used/purchased by anyone, or goes anywhere where other people are, you cannot find any sort of real privacy within Second Life. (I have an alt like this. She was the first avatar I made, three days before I decided I didn't like her name and made Helix instead. It's very boring, logging in as her.)

Instead, we engage in a shared polite fiction, encouraged by LL's official viewer, which does not show us all the information that is available about a resident's online status etc. etc.

Rather like the Victorian custom of being 'not at home' (Miss Pickering may be sitting in her parlor ten feet away as the butler tells Mister Lowbottom she is not at home, and then tells Lord Chesty to follow him in.), the viewer acts as the butler, informing visitors whether one is 'at home' to you, or not, regardless of where they actually are.

Emerald takes away the parlor door and shows us Miss Pickering, violently shaking her head no to Mister Lowbottom while smiling and welcoming Lord Chesty.

Yes, all this information was easily available before, but how many people sought it out? Not many, I would imagine. Finding out a sweetheart or close friend has been clicking you off hurts. It is a surprise, and it stings like a slap, and one does not always behave rationally in the moments following such a discovery.

And Emerald kind of shoves it in your face.

--

Some quick thoughts on etiquette in a virtual world with NO TRUE PRIVACY.

• Ideally, we would never click one another off. There are many reasons for doing this, I suppose. Many of them could be resolved if LL would allow residents to show their 'busy' or 'away' statuses in the contact list. But frankly, learning to politely say, as Miss Manners suggests when uninvited guests drop by, "Oh, how nice of you, but this is not a good time--please let's set up a time that's good for both of us so we can have a real visit." is a skill that would serve many people well in both lives.
  
  Personally, I never click anyone off. I think of how embarrassing it would be if Mister Lowbottom rose to the height of rudeness and broke the polite fiction by IMing and saying, "I know you are right there, Miss Pickering!"
  
  It's difficult to say, "I'm sorry, I'm busy ATM, but I want to spend time with you later." You run the risk someone will hear "I'm too busy for you" instead of "I want to spend time with you later." You do risk hurting feelings and whatnot. But by clicking off, you are pretty much guaranteed to cause some hurt.


• Following on that point, if someone has clicked you off, it would indeed be the height of rudeness to IM them while they are 'not at home' to you. Trust me. Wait and discuss it later, if it merits discussion.


• Be extraordinarily stingy with your mapping privileges. They are much more difficult to take away than they are to give. Some time ago, I removed everyone on my flist from mapping privs. I did this so no one person would feel singled out.


• If someone has given you mapping privileges, do not try not to use them! Why on earth do you need to know if your friend is poking around the seedier corners of Zindra?


• Above all, do not ever ever teleport to a mapped friend's location. I find this to be the absolute pinnacle of rudeness, whether it be a casual friend or your fake pixel spouse of four years. It was one such event which precipitated (along with a few other minor incidents) my removing everyone on my list from mapping privs.


• Never take a landmark to a friend's house without being invited to do so. And if you have been invited to do so, or if a friend has given you a landmark, never drop by without being invited. EVEN IF they say 'drop by anytime.'


• Be even stingier with your edit privileges. Someone with edit privs can move your things, return things to you, and otherwise mess up your stuff. And if someone grants you edit privs, never ever use them for anything other than whatever specific task the person asks you to use them for. Moving a house. Adjusting a tree. etc. This is basic common courtesy. Don't mess with people's stuff without permission.


• Lastly, be aware of the location you log from, and where you log in to. Don't 'last log' into your friend's home unless they specifically told you they wanted you to. Even if they are your absolute BFF and they totally would never mind, don't do it unless they tell you directly that they want you to. It's inconsiderate and rather boorish otherwise.

So I've been thinking a lot lately about how the SL-online experience is different from other online experiences, particularly the LJ-based fandom-esque online experience I've been a part of for most of the decade. A big part of SL is the... creating of identities other than your own. You can dress up as anything you want and play a role, in a way. And some people think of it as just that--a big RP playground. But not everyone thinks of it that way, so there's a lot of potential for crossed wires and hurt feelings.

For my part, I chose a gender-neutral name on purpose in case I should ever get the urge to try on a male shape. I'm too lazy to make a whole alt for that. I haven't done it yet (okay, once, so I could set a poseball, but I didn't change my clothes/skin/hair and I looked like the Elephant Man dressed up as Tim Curry in the Rocky Horror Picture Show), but I could.

And here's where I'm getting a bit stuck on the differences between my fannish/LJ online life and SL. In fandom (at least my little corner of it), there's a sort of semi-unwritten code of behavior. It's a huge breach of etiquette to 'out' another fan's RL identity, but at the same time you aren't supposed to lie (too much, at least!) about who you ARE. Especially in a journal-based environment, where people post about personal things as much or more than they do about fannish things. So you maintain your level of privacy and respect others privacy wishes, but you don't create an identity out of whole cloth and present it as YOU.

As an example, here's a scenario I was personally affected by: several years ago, I RPed for a while in an LJ-based game. There was a lot of OOC chat via IMs and I got to be friends with several of my fellow players, including a male player (which is unusual in the area of fandom I usually play in). After I left the game, I kept up chatting with my friends on a pretty much daily basis. The male player and I turned out to have very similar musical tastes, and we mostly chatted about that and traded tunes. After a time, we started talking about our personal lives and growing up (we were--supposedly--around the same age) and got to a point where--I thought--we were good friends.

Well, you can probably guess the rest: fast-forward a couple years and it comes out that this man was in fact a woman who had made up three or four LJ-indentities around the time the RP game started. None of the life history and anecdotes this man had told were true. The woman claimed to suffer from some sort of identity disorder. There was grumbling and anger and wank. For the most part, I just felt kind of sad that this person I thought I knew never even existed. And sadder still that the person behind my friend never trusted me enough to tell me. It was all a game. A separate compartment.

ANYWAY.

In SL, you kind of come in with the expectation that everyone you meet isn't exactly what they appear to be. It's dressup, it's costumes, it's theater! To a degree, at least. That big burly dude with the tats and the piercings might have an alt that's a blonde, double-D Gorean love-slave. Or the burly dude might be the love-slave's alt!

So I had to shift my perspective a bit when I joined SL. You really do have a better time if you just accept each AV as it appears. Don't waste time wondering who the AV 'really' is. Don't worry about gender.

Of course, that's easy enough to say. But SL isn't JUST playacting. People make real friends and connect on personal levels beyond the AV they present to the world. There's a kind of murky line that can grow between RL and SL once you start talking about RL things. What was a silly game, a distraction, can snowball into something larger than anyone ever expected.