Tony Curzon Price: Tell me who to believe in Second Life? And can I believe your answer?
Filed at 9:00 am on February 26, 2008 in Credibility • Leave a comment
Tony Curzon Price of opendemocracy.net previews an upcoming conversation in Second Life this Friday on “Credibility and Reputation in the New News.” The discussion will explore questions about the credibility and accuracy of news and information in virtual worlds. Tony will be talking with Jonathan Zittrain, Professor and Internet Scholar at Oxford University. Kathy Im, of MacArthur’s General Program will moderate.
We live in a torrent of media that forms a pyramid of value: bits, data, information, knowledge, understanding, wisdom. The question of belief-worthiness, credibility, comes in to the transformation of each level of media into the level above it. Bits are turned into data according to Error Correcting Codes and Shanon’s engineering science of communication. Knowledge turns into understanding when it can be slotted into a framework that accounts for a wider range of phenomena, etc. So where does Second Life fit in these processes of transformation? That will be the question for the SL panel that MacArthur, USC and openDemocracy will be hosting on Feb 29 at 18:00 GMT. My own view is that there are two types of SL presence. The first—-mine, for example—-is as an infrequent tourist. And it shows! My dancing abilities are even worse than in reality, and I’m not much good at sitting in the right place either. The second is much more engaged: you have some land, own stuff, look after your appearance and have lots of SL-only friends. It is in that second case that I’m really interested to find out how reputations arise for trustworthiness. Who do you believe in SL, and why? Do they contribute to turning your in-world information into knowledge? Come and share your in-world experiences—- the invite is here—- and don’t laugh too much at my avatar-control!
Editor’s note: See here and here for recaps of past events in MacArthur’s year-long exploration on philanthropy in virtual worlds.
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