Today in Social Media and Collaborative, we watched a documentary about Second Life, to learn about the pros and cons of social media. The documentary was crazy, but I enjoyed it because my best friend and I love watching MTV's True Life in our spare time.
In the documentary, an English couple met on the site and we're so obsessed with Second Life they had their wedding on the platform! Yes, they actually made friends and family members make avatars so they could be present. The other women in the documentary was a married American woman from the West Coast who became addicted to Second Life after she became unsatisfied being a stay-at-home mom. She had four children and the most devoted husband and would be on Second Life for 14 hours a day!! She was basically having an affair with a man from across the pond whose name was Elliot. He had an avatar that only wore jeans and weapons. To figure out if she was actually in love with Elliot and not his social media presence, she traveled to England to meet him in person. I was happy Elliot didn't end up having any real feelings for her. She was very selfish, and while I watched the documentary I kept hoping her husband would leave her, but unfortunately he never did. At the end of the documentary, the husband compared himself to Forrest Gump. Although he knew he deserved better, he couldn't leave his wife because he was, to quote the musical Grease, "hopelessly devoted."
I'm not sure when the documentary was released, but the narrator did say Second Life is one of the biggest social media platforms. I found that really hard to believe and when I did some research on Wikipedia, the article said Second Life had one million users in 2013. I believe the documentary came out in the early 2000's. Second Life was founded in 2003, a year before Facebook. It took Facebook ten months to gain 1 million users, and I didn't create my account till 2008, which I really view as the year Facebook became a mainstream phenomenon. Today Facebook has 1.65 monthly active users. I have been unable to find out how many people use Second Life in 2016, but the site is still active.
Another surprising thing I learned from this documentary is some users on Second Life actually make a living off the site. Now that just blew my mind! thought the only social media platforms people could make money off were the most prolific ones, such as Instagram, YouTube, and Vine. Turns out I was wrong.
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