Caleb Booker

Harper’s voice carries across worlds.

When Linden Lab was first announcing that they were bringing voice to Second Life, it bothered me. Actually, I was ticked right off.

For the most part I was just sick of the grid crashing, massive lag, and an overall disappointing experience around the grid. We kept complaining, and they kept rolling out new features instead of fixing it. Whenever things got really horrible and we turned to the company blog for some kind of acknowledgment of the crisis at hand, we’d hear about Windlight experiments, turning the sun into a big blotch, or bringing voice to the grid. It was infuriating to be ignored so blatantly, so obviously, as if they were teasing us.

A small part of me was worried about something else as well: voice was going to transform the way people in Second Life communicated, and not necessarily for the better.

Much of Second Life’s content and culture has been formed by people who, for one reason or another, flourished in the text-only space. Some are privacy addicts, like Pixeleen Mistral, Editor of the infamous Second Life Herald who simply doesn’t acknowledge requests for voice or any other real-world info. Others, like Torley Linden of Linden Lab or Tateru Nino of Massively, just don’t absorb information through voice nearly as easily as they do through text. Immersionists who have been portraying themselves as a member of the opposite sex aren’t to crazy about it either.

The process of leaving behind the old guard of text-only users has begun, unfortunately. It’s not here yet, but as Tateru commented to me in a recent email: “The percentage of people who won’t speak to me except in voice is slowly increasing. Not quickly, but noticeably.”

The fact is that I’m addicted to voice now, as I knew I would be. Events from Clever Zebra are almost religiously carried on in voice so that we might take video. Without voice, video isn’t a viable medium (and neither are podcasts for that matter).

The public at large are becoming just as addicted. At a recent Metanomics session the audience asked questions using voice. When one person’s voice wasn’t working right, she had Harper Beresford (pictured above) ask the questions on her behalf rather than just typing the question out for the host to read.

Now that we have it, that’s it. As soon as someone starts using voice, they don’t go back.

Of course, now that I’m a user I’m having to suffer from the side-effects that go along with the addiction. It used to be that with a text conversation I could run and grab a cup of tea, or go to the bathroom, come back and catch up on the conversation. No problems.

That’s over now. Our ability to get things done is reduced in a number of ways:

1. You’re stuck, trapped in that conversation until it has run its course. You can’t walk away for fear of missing something. Stay. Pay. Attention. Right. Now.
2. If they ask you a question you can’t take a minute to think it over before answering. Your answer is expected within a few seconds, or they assume either a technical glitch or (worse) that you were ignoring them.
3. Everyone is so quick to answer that it’s much harder to think before speaking. I’ve observed some serious regression in less formal settings.
4. You can only ever have one conversation at a time now.
5. Being polite is a much more difficult and cumbersome process, requiring control of pitch, tone and constant self-censoring. Some find it easy, but that’s not the point. Allocating mental resources to these maintenance routines often interferes with “getting things done” routines and “saying what needs to be said” functions. Those used to carry on in text quite well without offending anyone.

If anything, the augmentation of voice has diminished us somewhat. I wonder if other tools we invent in the future will have a similar effect?

Posted on January 16th, 2008 under conflict, content, customer service, futurism, new media. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.