Class\strata

And by making that suggestion you show your lack of class

Yea knowest thou there are two classes. Come down from Heaven, springing from their own minds according to the Secret, or appearing from the nothingness of the void............ insert your own belief. Looking down up on all who dwell in this fair land known as Second Life are the Creators and Artists. They are gods among men. All look up to them and wish to one day be counted among their hallowed ranks. Or to put it in terms the peasants can understand, they think their shit don't stink.


Far below this exalted group of immortals are the great unwashed masses of Second Life. Some are here for fun. Some for sex. (often those two are the same thing) Some come for the near unlimited shopping. Profit is a motive for many of them. Those of us who make up this great mass of unworthies should pray, think positive thoughts, insert your own way of mentally helping, those great ones above us.

"but you guuuuuyss!! we should all just, like, be ourselves."

Not really. And nor can class be hereditary in SL the way it is in RL, for obvious reasons, so as far as class exists, it has to be defined in an SL-specific way.

I would say that the main key to status is how many people who have never met you, nevertheless know your name.

It's only a model.

I'm a peasant, remember?

There are people who have been here longer, or for less time than me. There may even be people who got some kind of leg-up from being in early or friends with the company. I never cared, I still don't.

I don't look up to anyone, I don't look down on anyone. Except maybe "island developers" with an overgrown sense of entitlement If I don't laugh at something I usually shrug instead.

Class and strata in SL? In your head, maybe. Not in mine.

Now that blows the theory out of the water; you have had a major impact on my SL experience with your work. Maybe that is who is the most influential in SL, the content creators whose work shapes what you can be and experience in SL. Maybe for once the artists are in charge!

Strictly in terms of economy, here are the "classes" listed in terms of monetary flow:

Content creators are at the top. These are the people who make SL what it is. They are the builders, scripters, texture creators, sim developers, and animation makers. They create content that land barons and end users consume. They are hired to develop sims, or they develop their own sims.

Content creators need not sell their creations; Arcadia Asylum is a very well-known user who only makes freebies, and her content is integrated into various builds across Second Life.

Land barons are a step below. They are different from full-fledged sim-developers in that they do not add extensive value to land beyond using purchased content. They purchase sims, pretty them up a bit, and resell/rent them out. On the mainland they are largely interchangeable; they are more of a fact than a necessity, and will always exist nomatter what; they are middle men.

The end users are the individuals who purchase or rent land and content for personal use. They may have a "job" as an escort, sim admin/security, customer service for a business, etc. Content creators and to a lesser extent land barons are forced to cater to them.

Currently LL is taking a "trickle-up" or demand-side approach to economics. They are very aggressively reducing the price of SL's only commodity, mainland price, by releasing new land at a very swift pace. If land is cheaper, more end users will purchase land, and have more money left over to purchase furniture, prefabs, landscaping materials, and everything else. This will have the effect of making the economy of SL as a whole much stronger.

As far as social classes, it is actually quite a bit removed from economic classes. It is more measured in terms of community involvement than anything else.

I don't buy the class thing in SL at all.. sorry.. You got Lindens, and you got the rest.. period. Class isn't a popularity measure... it's an archaic form of determining the WORTH of someones life. Not how rich you are, or how many friends you have, but who your parents and grandparents were. Guess what? There are no parents in SL and no supposedly "better quality DNA" to be passed down. Even the Lindens at one time showed up in world as one of the preset avitars, lookin all box-headed and triangle-footed. Being the better builder, the better creator, the better baron never means they're the better person. It's who they are as a person inside that determines if they are or aren't. The only true classes in SL are given by LL for their own use.. and that's concierge, premium, and basic. Please dont confuse class with social popularity or notoriety, it's not the same.

When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.

I liked Chip Midnight's definition: People I know, and people I don't know. Of the people I know: people I like and people I don't like.

Pretty simple and very true.

I had a castle, and I assure you it did not have a dungeon filled with freebie sex furniture. I paid good money for the sex furniture in my dungeon.

Elf
Warrior
Paladin
Priest
Amazon
Necromancer
Shopoholic
Shoefetishist
Mallrats
Dinosaurs
ummmmm..did i cover them all?

fixes Class List:

those who wear bad shoes and those who wear good ones?

That sounds more like a Blizzard game....

There are two kinds of people in the world.
Me and Everyone Else.

Too bad you're Second Class then.

In that order, I should point out.

Surely if I'm Second Class on the internet, that makes me First Class in real life?

/me falls off her chair laughing


Good one!

Class/Strata

I got a shovel and started digging. This is what I discovered, in the order I found them:

Chuds
Morlocks
Mole Men
Lava Men

I think that covers everyone.

If you had managed, hypothetically, to get through the lava you would have come to the control room where the Grand Masters (the survivors of Atlantis) run the world. We call them Lindens.

Conan, i hope you were joking about the genetics angle ( it has never been proven that you inherit brains. In fact the last people who tried to prove this were racist nazis and their master race theory).

If you know how noobs are treated in-world(getting attacked, being mistreated due to their newness), can we say that there is no class. Class does segregate, and even though some in the thread say it does'nt exist in SL, we clearly have Noobs, age elitists, voicers, non-voicers and the list goes on. I wear the same old yellow intro to SL clothes, and i refuse to change. I refuse to change based on the negative perception that noobs recieve in-world. I would rather be apart of the percieved dregs of society, rather than be apart of any assumed elite class.

Whats up Desmond, you are definitely are apart of the upper crust.

In RL class is based originally on inherited wealth/power/privilege but increasingly societies allow more social mobility based on wealth or fame, especially wealth. In SL one cannot apply the concept directly, since there is no inheritance across generations, but that doesn't mean one can't adapt the idea of class to the SL environment.

What it comes down to is perceived status, with emphasis on "perceived". Anyone taking the line "I am upper class because I say so" is fooling no-one but themselves.

So far as SL has an upper class, it is those who are perceived by a significant proportion of residents to have status. Some degree of fame is therefore a prerequisite. If no-one outside your narrow social circle has a clue who you are, your perceived status in the community is nil.

So Anonim is not far out when he says that content creators, who are known throughout SL for their creations, are at or near the top of the pile.

SL is proof that class is socially perceived.

in some sims I'm a noob.

in avilion mist I'm middle social class I guess.

in surf city I'm upper middle class with high prestige if I'm flying the surf city scripter title.

also classes seem to follow the Thomas theorem(things are as real as individuals and society perceive them to be) in this case the so called class status.

What is this, High School?