Where Do You Stand, take 2: Virtual Sociopolitics

Building on Desmond's earlier poll here. I'd have liked to include another eight questions or so, but I ran out of energy. You'll probably think it's too long anyway.

I'll post the scoring and axes I used a little later.

(Edit: Okay, I can't figure out how to make a multiple-question poll here, or how to delete this post. I'll come back after I check out Quizzilla and see if that's any more useful.)

I dun't see nuffin.

Okay, Quizzilla sucks too. I know how to do this with a LiveJournal poll, but you'd have to create an account to vote if you don't already have one. It's free, but still... are there enough people interested to bother? Or is there a way to make a multiple-question, multiple-answer poll here that I'm just too clueless to figure out?

(The LiveJournal option has the advantage of maybe drawing in some folks who aren't typical forum users and may represent a better cross section of SL's users.)

Maybe you can make multiple polls and post daily updates of the resultant data between all of them?

Nah, that's way too much work. LiveJournal does good.

Very good, in fact: http://bedawyn.livejournal.com/202456.html

You will need to create a free account to vote, which you can do here (http://www.livejournal.com/), if you don't already have one. Individual results are private; I can see them if I look but others won't be able to. Or you can skip voting if you don't want an account, just record your choices by hand and post them here.

Wow, that looks... in depth. I passed on filling out the livejournal account thing though.

*pouts*

Okay, ya'll may have gotten bored with this topic, but I haven't, so I'm just gonna keep yammering, so there.

The poll I devised contained 12 multiple-choice questions wrapped around four axes: Immersionist/Augmentationist, Authoritarian/Grass-Roots-Oriented, Invested/Not-Invested, and Community-Driven/Individualistic. If anyone wants to re-do this somewhere where you don't need another account to vote, go for it.

With only three questions per axis, scoring on an individual level (2 points for each first answer, 1 for each second, 0 for the third, and -1 for the last) probably won't mean much. However, in the aggregate, the participants (25 voters) came out as just slightly Immersionist and definitely but not passionately Grass-Roots-Oriented, Invested, and Community-Driven. LiveJournal itself is strongly community-driven, so I expected a stronger trend that way, but it didn't show up. Of course, 25 votes isn't much to base anything on.

The Immersionist/Augmentationist axis covers the questions on anonymity, voice, and roleplaying. Most of the voters went for slightly immersionist, with only a few on the Augmentationist side of the spectrum. However, on roleplaying, results leaned toward the Augmentationist side, and Voice results were all over the place.

Rather than pitting the individual against the state, I decided to look at whether power comes from the top-down or from the bottom-up. The Authoritarian/Grass-Roots axis covers the questions on open sourcing, financial fraud, and Linden involvement. The trend here was for moderation, leaning towards grass roots.

The Invested/Not-Invested axis started out as Landed/Landless, but it's not really about owning land as much as it is about having invested limited resources (whatever those may be for you) into Second Life. These are the questions on digital content, access controls, and adult verification. On digital content, people leant towards invested, although people didn't like my wording of this question any more than Desmond's original! People also leant that way on access controls, but were more evenly spread out on adult verification.

The questions on resident government, grief builds, and social activity are Community-Driven/Individualistic. People were all over the place on these.

Some of the questions are tricky, because libertarian leanings will affect people's answers beyond the axes I was working with. I do think libertarianism needs to be in there somewhere, I'm just not convinced it's the natural opposite of authoritarianism.

Whoa, wait. How did I miss this? Is the polling over?

I need new glasses. I thought it was about "Virtual Sociopaths."

No, that'll probably be the title of the synopsis of the results that Rihanna is no doubt preparing for us.

I probably am a virtual sociopath, so I've no real desire to study them.

Anyone can still vote -- I tallied up the results because it had been a few days and I figured anyone who'd want to already had.

I missed this somehow, so I'll head over and vote now.

That phrase is copyright Pserendipity Daniels.

Pep (Cease and desist!)

This is a bit of a random thought, but perhaps we force all the random survey noobs to take *this* one before we respond to them.

And once we do, they have to take all the other surveys that have been posted here over the last year or so...

The poll is timing out for me.

I thought it was a nicely done poll.

My biggest problem with it was distinguishing, in my own responses, between what I think SHOULD be permitted, and my own personal preferences, which are not necessarily the same.

For instance, I really don't role play at all. Ever. It's just not my thing. And I think I would find it difficult to type RP chat while giggling.

But that doesn't mean that I am an "augmentationist," much less that I believe that everyone in SL should be.

You do show a bit of a bias in the DCD question with your use of the term "content thieves".

Yes, I'm trying to post on that and it's timing out. Let me try here.

"The rift between content creators and content thieves" is kind of misleading... the problem is way bigger than that. The rift is between content creators and ALL content users, and even between content creators and content creators. Read Lawrence Lessig's book "Free Culture"... there's one story in there where a not-for-profit documentary that happened to include a few seconds of "The Simpsons" playing incidentally on a television set during an interview in a break room had to digitally replace it with something generic because they couldn't afford to license the clip. For a few seconds of tape in the corner of the view that many people wouldn't even notice.

Yeah, it's timing out for me now too. Guess they're having a rough day.


Yeah, some of the questions were definitely about how we as individuals use it, and some about what ought to be possible. A few put them in conflict. For instance, I think LL OUGHT to be able to identify us, but I personally would still love to be able to get away with anything anonymously -- I wouldn't use it, but I'd like to have the option. But we'd all like to have our cake and eat it too, so I didn't worry about that too much. The adult verification question was another like that, which is why I put it on the Invested-Not Invested axis; I think we'd probably all like not to be verified for anything, but I figured the adult content providers -- who are more invested than the consumers -- would be more likely to weigh the shoulds higher than the wants. Any other particular question where that was a problem?


I think, as I'm defining them, that would mean you are an augmentationist, at least slightly. What does the term mean to you, that would make you disagree?

Yeah, I wrangled and wrangled that line trying to come up with a nonbiased way to say it that didn't require twenty words of waffling. I finally figured that answer was supposed to indicate a bit of bias anyway (an acceptance that the property model isn't inherently wrong), so I might as well use it. Any ideas for improving it?


So maybe just "content creators and content users" (because a creator of other content is still a content user with regard to any content made by someone else)? But is that a rift, at all, since some content users have no problem with paying for everything?

It's not just a matter of "paying for everything". In the rights economy envisioned by the likes of the MPAA you would have to pay royalties for things like casual commentary, even for incidental images in snapshots if you put them online, and pay through the nose at that. In the example in Lessig's book, the documentary producer wanted to license the clip, but the rate quoted was something like $10,000 for 15 seconds of out-of-focus material in the corner of the picture, and the rights holder wasn't willing to make any kind of deal. I'm sure they'd be more reasonable about a picture of your kid with his new Mickey Mouse phone, but nothing's free in the rights economy.

I guess it depends on how you define "role playing" or "immersionist." I don't "role play," in any sense: who I am in SL is really pretty much (mutatis mutandis) who I am in RL. BUT I also don't treat SL like a cartoony version of Facebook: I "live" quite independently of my RL existence here, and keep my RL and SL very separate.

Yep, those evil, awful FREE polls... if that poll cost twenty five dollars to set up then it would be nicely efficient and websites would run on time!

grins, and stops stirring the pot now

I don't usually role-play, in the sense of acting out a story line, but I do act in-character most of the time. The scope of activities described by "role playing" and "immersionism" is fairly broad and loosely defined.