Burning Bridges: Protecting Yourself Online

While Linden Lab offers certain advantages to instructors who teach on islands, not all instructors will have the means to a Second Life educational island. For them, it is even more important to consider what to do when the multiple in-worlds of Second Life inevitably collide. Much of the advice offered by Linden Lab, however, boils down to avoidance or silence. In an email interview with Bugeja, Harper (2007) detailed some of Linden Lab’s means to protect educational institutions that choose to use Second Life for teaching:

[V]irtual harassment and assault differ significantly from instances in real life. For example, virtual assault cannot cause physical harm, and an avatar cannot be forced to do anything against its controller’s will, Residents can easily “mute” any object or individual that is bothering them, and, ultimately, any incident can be ended by teleporting elsewhere or leaving Second Life temporarily. In the virtual world, it is easier to end instances of these problems; it is also easier to report them, as there is an abuse-reporting tool built in to the Second Life viewer. (Bugeja, 2007, p. 6).

Similarly, Ginsu Yoon, vice president for business affairs at Linden Lab, advocates a commonsense approach to safety in Second Life: Residents should understand what they are doing, what the consequences are, and use available tools to ensure that they are dealing with a trusted party (cited in Talbot, 2008, p. 60).

Though valid advice, it is often difficult to predict how the avatar standing across from you will act in any given situation, thus making Yoon’s advice to “know what the consequences are” troublesome. And as F. Gregory Lastowka and Dan Hunter (2004) note, many Second Life players may not view leaving the space, whether temporarily or permanently, as a genuine option, particularly when one examines the conscious choice of “resident” by Linden Lab to refer to player characters. The term “resident” implies that the individual is not just a temporary visitor but a full-fledged member of the community with all the rights and privileges granted to such individuals, such as the ability to build and own property, customize one’s own living space, and—perhaps most importantly—to expect recourse of some kind if harassment were to occur. Thus, Lastowka and Hunter question, “is the option of virtual exit real if it entails giving up family, friends, property, society, and your very form?” (p. 62).