Profoundly worrying underbelly to Second Life. Far from being a harmless fantasy world, it is a cyber-society where conventional morality has been set aside in favour of a far darker and more worrying pattern of behaviour. Obsessed with sex and awash with pornography, it is a 'place' where the behaviour of some of its 'residents' is so deeply unedifying it beggars belief that it could ever have been hailed as a lighthearted retreat from the real world. So what exactly is Second Life and who uses it? Put simply, it's a computer chat room on steroids. Users log on to an internet site and are then able to communicate with other users around the world. The novelty lies in the fact that communication isn't just verbal.
While users chat with one another by tapping in questions and comments on their keyboards, they are also represented on screen by their own virtual character, or avatar.As in a computer game, these characters are controlled by the users via their keyboards - and can be made to walk or fly around the virtual world, the simulated landscape - that is Second Life.
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