Let me start by saying that I am all for advocacy groups using virtual worlds to promote their causes. Virtual environments like Second Life are the newest forms of "new media" and as such should be certainly considered for use in political and awareness-raising campaigns. That said, I HATE the big billboard that the World Development Movement has put up on the Warmouth sim in Second Life. It’s ugly, it’s negative and it doesn’t mobilize. (Thanks the Tateru for the heads up in the SL Insider.)
The billboard says in stark black letters "DON’T FORGET THE REAL WORLD." As you get closer to it, some script calls up a statistic of how many children have died from poverty since Second Life has been running. Apparently that number is up to 36,224,397 kids when I dropped in this morning. A computer nearby takes you to the WDM website when you click it. And that’s it.
The billboard is labeled at the bottom the "Global Poverty Death Counter" and is backed by a bloody red stain. Nice. They might as well have called it :
This is all very unfortunate since the World Development Movement, a United Kingdom-based advocacy group, has been responsible for a number of clever and influencial campaigns, notably the "Make Poverty History" campaign which as I understand was a huge success in the UK at getting folks to pay attention to global poverty issues.
What is ironic is that the WDM has not learned to apply what they presumably have learned from their other campaigns into virtual space. Namely that it isn’t enough just to shame people. "Don’t forget the real world" contains such a superior, pejorative tone. I.e. "Hey, idiot, get your head out of the digital sand and pay attention to things that matter."
And the WDW billboard gives a virtually useless statistic: children who have died of poverty since Second Life started running. What does this mean? Was Second Life responsible for these deaths? If we weren’t plugged into Second Life, would more kids be alive? It’s all so opaque the thinly veiled blaming.
They should take a tip from their own past work if they really want to meaningful engage in virtual activism:
- Get to know the community first. The Stand Up against Poverty folks hired a real in-world designer Aimmee Weber to handle their in-world campaign. She was able to tell them how to effectively get people energized about their project.
- Educate: Who are all these dead children? Who killed them? Corrupt governments? The World Bank? Multinational corporations?
- Mobilize: Give people something to do. And not just fundraise. Oh there’s a tip-jar nearby. Big freakin deal. Find ways to connect people to real efforts to save children’s lives. Script a device that will connect people to real world efforts to provide clean water, jobs, education, access to technology, etc.
- Provide Hope: A statistic about a lot of dead children just fills you with dread and sadness. No one gets mobilized with that. You have to provide hope that it’s actually possible to end grinding poverty so people can feel good about doing their part.
I will try and contact whoever is responsible and see what their in-world plans are. If it’s just to shame avatars, they should save their sim rental fees. If they want to do virtual activism right, I’m happy to connect them with folks doing cool stuff in Second Life like In Kenzo at Camp Darfur and Barry at Global Kids.
Tateru Nino writes for the Second Life Insider, not the Herald. They’re two very different blogs.
Sorry about that. Corrected!
Nice critique. I’ve been enjoying your blog for months now. Keep up the commentary.
Rik, these kind of hard left Marxist campaigns give the whole humanitarian movement a bad name. The problem isn’t just guilt-tripping, it’s removing responsibility from corrupt and murderous governments and roving bands of murderous rebel thugs, and taking child mortality as if it is some kind of thing like the weather, abstracting it, globalizing it,a and making it the West’s “fault” merely because the West is wealthy.
One of the reasons the West *is* wealthy is that over the centuries, it has learned how to democratize governments, call them account, and curb their murderous tendencies and also made it so that murderous thuggish rebel groups don’t take over, either. Not easy to do. Not something you export on the end of a tank or missile. But not something to be avoided in the name of facile and cheap leftist politics.
Thanks for the honest assessment her! Something we should add to the wiki for sure.
Hi – thanks for the comments, and I totally agree – WDM’s first venture into second life was a crude attempt to get noticed and to that aim we succeeded, although most of our positive coverage of the ‘Death Counter’ was from the press outside SL, who themselves are sceptical about SL. With campaigning shock often has a greater impact; to quote one of the articles about this instalation:
“(the)campaign has reminded the inhabitants of Second Life that while they fanny about wasting time and money hiding from their own trivial worries there are people are dying unnecessarily in the real world.”
Scathing comment on SL!
I would love to do more, and i’m sure version 2 will have much more interactivity as I learn to write better scripts in SL. One campaign we worked one this year was the human right to water – http://www.blueoctobercampaign.org/ something that I think would work beautifully in SL. So please keep making comments, this is a new venture for us, and criticism is good to hear. As we’re a smaller organisation I have quite a free hand to be creative with what I do.
To Satchmo – We’re not a ‘hard left’ bunch of Marxists – although we always get accused of this “give a man a loaf of bread and you’re a saint; ask him why he’s starving and your a communist” – we work with a diverse range of political groups from the left and right. All we care about is ending poverty.
Thanks for the reply, Peter. And, uh, welcome to SL!
There is certainly some justification for accusing SL residents of burying their heads in the sand. But…
(1) this totally insults the many non-profits, educators, activists, artists and others who AREN’T ignoring the real world but are extending it into their virtual activities in creative and exciting ways. It’s simply not correct to pain all virtual worlders with the same broad, judgemental brush.
And (2) it’s just questionable strategy to piss off the thousands residents of SL just to score some points in the media. I suppose you could run TV ads that say “Hey couch potato, here’s how many children have died of AIDS since television has been invented.” But it wouldn’t win you many converts to the cause.
If you want to learn about how other advocacy and humanitarian efforts are using SL, you may want to stop in on the weekly meetings of TechSoup on Info Island, or interface with the Better World Island folks who coordinate via the Omidyar network.
I’m happy to talk more in-world or off-line about this.
Hey Rik
Good commentary on the WMD intro into SL. Read it last night, then caught this on Boing Boing this morning.
Homeless kid in Second Life
“From December 4 on, the Spain-based NGO Mensajeros de la Paz will be present in the virtual world of Second Life as a homeless teenager avatar named MensajerosDeLaPaz Jubilee. The kid hasn’t any land nor properties, except for a cardboard box, some newspapers and a sign that says: ‘Help a child have a second oportunity in his First Life.'”
I haven’t been inworld in a matter of weeks – bogged down with grad work – so can’t speak to the merits of WMD or this one. But I think we might also see – and it would be fascinating, IMGeekishO – scholarly looks at such campaigns in SL.
Hey Rik
Good commentary on the WMD intro into SL. Read it last night, then caught this campaign by a different organization on Boing Boing this morning – and this is organization is cross-marketing theirs through YouTube!
Homeless kid in Second Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOz2x9cYUhQ
“From December 4 on, the Spain-based NGO Mensajeros de la Paz will be present in the virtual world of Second Life as a homeless teenager avatar named MensajerosDeLaPaz Jubilee. The kid hasn’t any land nor properties, except for a cardboard box, some newspapers and a sign that says: ‘Help a child have a second oportunity in his First Life.'”
(There’s more on BoingBoing)
I haven’t been inworld in a matter of weeks – bogged down with grad work – so can’t speak to the merits of WMD or this one. But I think we might also see – and it would be fascinating, IMGeekishO – scholarly looks at such campaigns in SL.
Thanks, Tony. Talking to the group now…
Rik, the other problem with this offensive sign is that it is based on the misperception that SL is purely a form of escapism, and no-one is doing any ‘real work’ in there, which, as you know, is totally untrue.
This shows that WMD doesn’t have a proper understanding of the environment they are working in, and obviously haven’t done the requisite research before launching their campaign.
In this sense it makes them no better than those corporates that come into SL with a lot of fanfare, claiming they are the first at something in SL and buliding pretty but useless expensive builds that add no value to SL and show a total lack of understanding of the environment.
This is a shame, because I’m all for constructive uses of SL too. Hopefully this will be a warning to others to do their research!