"There's no such thing a society" - discuss

Margaret Thatcher once said that there was no such thing as society. I believe the point she was making was that a "Cult of the Individual" had sprung up in the 1980s and that social obligations were being eroded by the rampant pursuit of personal gain.

How many people in SL feel like there is such a thing as society (in SL)?

Are we a community, or are we just a collection of individuals?

How many of you have actually had a full conversation with one or more of your SL neighbours?

Do you believe that returning to the old system of having a TP hub in the centre of each sim, thus forcing people to walk everywhere, would return a sense of community?

Perhaps you think TPing should be removed all-together, and a system of public transport/roads be introduced to mimic real life(?) There's a strong argument to suggest this would build a stronger community ethos within a sim, as neighbours would "bump into one-another" on the street, like in RL.

I'd like to hear some opinions on this. Whaddya think?

I believe there is no such thing as the "SL Community". There are different communities and those may be identified by a common lifestyle, language or whatsoever.

Members of those communities can belong to more communities at once with different feelings and bounds.

I also believe there are individuals who don't want to be part of a community, or maybe they're part of very small communities (their family, close friends).

Public transport systems would be cool, but you shouldn't change anything we have now (teleport, fly).

So in essence, communities do exist with in SL, but what you are saying is that they are not limited by physical geography but by common interest/lifestyle choices instead.

I'm all in favour of better roads/paths for navigation but also agree that we shouldn't lose our fly/tp. They support different functions. I don't think the fact I tp alienates me from my neighbours. One I know and glad to call friend. Another I met but left. We have the mechanisms for a community here. I don't think we need to be pinned down to ground level to sustain it.

It's an interesting situation. I've heard from two others in recent days that like me, they are much more sociable in SL than RL and in RL we are shy and retiscent. Well, in actual fact I've started to open up in RL more due to this 'awakening' in SL.

I meet people in SL and have built up a circle of friends from around the world. I get a huge kick explaining this to people who don't yet know the power of SL.

Basing a society on geographical location in RL is what Margaret Thatcher was refering to. We have the power to build that society in SL marginalising geographical location. And I think largely, we are.

I've had lengthly conversations with at least 3 of my neighbours, a few others I've said hello's too and some I have never seen.

But yeah public transport would be great and perhaps if teleporting was limited somehow we would see more of SL, but then again maybe some of us would see less.

The best relationships are the ones where people share the same interest, rather than the same road.

I think if we had better privacy controls then people may be a little more sociable. I sometimes see somebody in a sandbox and I get the urge to go chat with them. But then I realize that they may turn out to be a total pain in the ass, and I fear I wont be able to get rid of them after.

I sometimes wonder if Linden Lab's refusal to allow us to disable IM's is really a subtle form of social engineering. Although I'm sure they mean well, I think they need to relax for their own sake.

Yeah, loose TP all together, then I will start a monolopy company called the SLYellow Cab Co... then employ all those social misfits that are really lonely, and have long boring stories to tell, while they drive you round SL. For a good tip, they will drive you direct to your destination... and when it's raining, they will all be busy.. same when you have an important meeting, or clubbing appointment... Hell RL is stressful enough, without imposing that in SL.


In RL we don't always choose our neighbours, some we prefer we didn't know (Neighbours from hell).. SL just gives a chance to 'walk' outside in our yard, or past their gateway, without having to 'chat' with them..... now if only RL could have a mute function.......

I think travelling through SL is impractical. The streaming 3D can't download fast enough and so this just makes the whole experience disagreeable.

Any new resident who comes to SL and is forced to travel through slow loading and gray scenery will probably never comeback ever again.

I think technically this is a very good point!
I'm sure the high proprtions of people stnding about or danicng chatting to others are loading the servers a lot less than if the majority were scrolling throught the 3D scenery.

Personally, I like a bit of exploration but for the most time in a session, I'm fairly rooted to the spot.

Thatcher caused the worst recession Britian had seen for the previous 50 years and was effectively an anti Robin Hood in that she took from the poor and gave to the rich. I could probably list another 100 reason for why I hate Thatcher but this isnt the place. Anyway ignoring her pointless comments...




I think SL has hundreds of pockets of small societies and communities and that there is no overall community to speak of. Just because a resident may own land in the middle of an established community doesnt make them a part of the community. Like rl, I think people conscioulsy make a choice as to whether they want to be part of a community or not whether it be their local nieghbourhood community or groups within sl.



Reverting back to Telehubs is pointless as most people in the 'know' used ROAM or another attachment in order to get to a specific set of coordinates anywhere on the map. Although not as fast as P2P teleporting it was certainlly more reliable!

Pulic transport would not work. The infastructure is not currently there and judging by LL's withdraw from the world recently, I cannot see them ever having the capacity to set up a public transport infastructure beyond the roads and rails currently in place (which is no where near enough), thats assuming they sorted out the issue of crossing sim borders etc.

When the general forums closed I felt cut off from whatever remained of the "SL community".

Kind of a point - It was a message to that effect.

This threads DOOMED to be closed the OP used the word Discuss in the Original Post.

True, discussion isn't permited in the SL forums, please use There, Home, The Sims, HiPiHi, WoW, Entropia, SWG, BTL, CoH or another similar 3rd party site to discuss SL

.. BUT .. remember a Linden actually asked us last week if we needed a general forum again?

It IS the place where you both traduce her and misrepresent her. She didn't have the time to cause the first recesion of her regime, because it arrived too soon; she did however take advantage of it to put through the reforms she was gonna enforce come what may. Also, the quote from the OP here is the usual out of context slice: what she said was, there is no society, there are only the actions of individuals.

When the full quote is provided, several things change: it utterly reverses what the anti-Thatcherites would dearly love her to have said - she was not rejecting the concept of compassion or agreed central values, she was saying that they only emerge or are enforced (or broken!) by the actions of individual people. She wasn't just championing individual rights, but individual responsibilities too.

Which is, in fact, extremely relevant to the question of what's up with SL, from a social POV. Personally, just to throw a spanner in everyone's works, I think we Brits owe the last 30 odd years of growth, and our new position in Europe, to that woman - and furthermore, that she was as mad as a box of frogs by the time she went, and had hung on for at least 3 years too long. I'm saddened to find grumpy old hippies who still imagine that the Funboy Three had the last word on TBW and her agenda - and having met Thatcher, AND Gerry Dammers, I know which one I'd rather have running the country...

As far as social circumstances in SL are concerned, my experience is that this long term period of structural instability is completely buggering up the experiment. It's impossible to say what might happen, or to whom, or how, when the system dumps it's guts every other damn week. the fast-track debug/release cycle might make the development team feel good, but to my mind it's sacrificing long term membership for shoret term flash.

If I was forum goddess for a day - Id just remake the off-topic forum.

Then you could do off topic discussions (which were never as nasty as general anyhow) and the "general" all in one place

Put a big warning up:
"This forum people just speak their minds - beware"

call it the

"We're grown-ups and we like to rant" forum.

The underlying question - What Are We? certainly deserves a lot of Resident answers and is certainly important enough to the development and future of SL. Close this thread and you may close off extremely valuable feedback.

well the infamous thread closer is

"This forum isnt for general discussion" so the OP using the word discussion in the Original post was just Thread suicide

It's actually not a bad idea to have "off topic day" once in a while - say every month or so? Might be a way to get some of the community juices flowing again?

By the way, I don't talk to my neighbors in SL because they have ban lines up and wear bling. Nuff said.

The "community" that I feel most a part of is the Snapzilla group - lots of regular snapperheads and commenters.

All that "This forum is not for discussion" is just nonsense. Many discussions take place on the forum and nobody cares. What Strife should say when locking a thread is - "I don't like this thread." or "I'm paranoid and I worry that this thread has an hidden agenda."

nah i think its

"Someone might complain about this thread and its not worth it."

To be honest I forget that these forums arnt for general discussion most of the time and generally say what I want as do allot of others. As long as a question is offered by the OP at the beginning and someone occasionaly makes a 'on topic' valid point' then most of rest just converse accross the forums on a daily basis accross a multitude of threads occasionally offering a valid or helpful opionion.

I've seen threads locked that nobody would've complained over.

One today that a moderator even posted into ... <whistle>

I think "discussions" is a useful form of selective enforcement for them. If a subject is something LL wants to hear from Residents about, they seem to let it run. If they don't, they wait till it turns into a flame war, or a silliness thread, or an endless loop where the sides take turns repeating their rants over and over while nobody listens and then put it out of its misery.