Last week, Congressman George Miller (D-CA) held a press conference to discuss the top six priorities of the new Democratic Congress. The location: virtual Capitol Hill, on an island in Second Life. Miller’s conference follows the lead set by former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, who in August 2006 was the first politician to travel into Second Life, the online virtual world that allows users to create and interact via avatars.

Nancy Scola, the mastermind behind Warner’s path-breaking foray into Second Life, contributes to this month’s IPDI newsletter on the social applications of Second Life.

She wonders what will happen if we loosen the reins a bit on our creativity and how to use the Second Life model for political action. Here are some of Second Life’s political advantages:

• Fewer logistical nightmares and more timely political events . – In Second Life, a laptop, a free hour or two, and an in-world venue quickly moves the event from conception to execution.

• Shadow political parties and shadow conventions. – The official meetings and conventions of state or national political parties are often unwieldy beasts. We might see the official party organizations holding open meetings every so often in Second Life. Or, if they choose not to, we might witness activists organizing parallel meetings in the metaverse, where time is spent plotting the takeover of the official party apparatus.

• Metaverse fundraising . – Not all too long ago, the cutting edge in raising money online was having a bat graphic that was colored in as the contribution dollars piled up. By doing away with many of the bonds of reality – time, space, physics, and (to some degree) social constraints – Second Life has blown the doors off of the old models of fundraising.

• Reaching out to early adapters . – Second Life opens up a wide range of possibilities for the execution of political advertising. At the least, we might soon see political ad firms setting up shop in Second Life, running virtual galleries to display their wares.

Click here to read Nancy’s article, “Avatar Politics: The Social Applications of Second Life“, part of the January 2007 IPDI e-newsletter. Want to receive the monthly newsletters in your inbox? Click here to join.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Games, IPDI, Second Life, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.