Looking into the Mirror

How we can try to build bridges between Second Life and secondary education to provide students with educational opportunities that don’t endanger their safety unnecessarily? What I hope to show is that Second Life is a space not that far removed from our own—a site that in many ways reflects the same kinds of concerns we share regarding intellectual property rights, standards of decency in our communities, free speech, and so on.

By focusing on the ways that Second Life residents are testing the limits of the site, students may gain a greater appreciation and understanding of how those same issues are also helping to shape our legal system. By analyzing the ways that racism, sexism, and hegemony are all replicated in Second Life through the construction of player avatars, virtual harassment, and property deletions, students should see their perception of those same issues in real life sharpen. And as such, one of the best ways that we can build bridges between Second Life and our first lives is to look carefully into the mirror and examine what is reflected back, for as Turkle (1995) has claimed, “We come to see ourselves differently as we catch sight of our images in the mirror of the machine” (p. 9).

An avatar looks into a mirror in Second Life. Image courtesy of cogdogblog on Flickr.