The New York Times has a great article about two competing trends, namely using drugs to augment intelligence and creativity, or using “mind expanding” technology to do it instead. (Forget, for a moment, the weed-puffing dope smokers would tell you there’s a natural creative enhancer already). One argument it gives against using drugs is that the “creativity shortcut” of using a pill may create a “delusional state” where “weak ideas are mistaken for strong ones”.

Supporters of using technology argue that computer networks are great enablers of human creativity because they can “share ideas with people they�??ve never met”. Quoting Lawrence Lessig, he points out that the Internet helps create “ideas that are more robust and create a wider range of perspectives.�?�

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I had an interesting conversation on the weekend with some friends, talking about Second Life, what it was, what it meant and so on. I held the view that Second Life fulfilled the requirements of being a type of drug, maybe even an hallucinogen, a highly addictive virtual substance that affected your senses and altered perception and reality. Having become addicted to old-school MUD’s in the mid-1990’s, I generally avoid online gaming as my addictive personality tends to not know when to quit, except perhaps too late (failing university was one consequence). So, when I hear of people dying from playing online games too much, or committing suicide, this strengthens my overall view that these things should be treated with extreme caution.

But something my one friend mentioned got me thinking. He asked, paraphrasing: “What’s the difference between what you do in Second Life, and what you do on, say, eBay? Or Amazon? Or any other internet activity?” And that’s, strictly speaking, true. A quick look at Second Life’s homepage shows 1.4 million users, and just over half a million dollars (US) spent in the last 24 hours (as of 16:51 GMT). But that’s not all. People have real-world business conferences in Second Life’s virtual setting, there’s traditional advertising and marketing and a virtual world representation of real world stores, musicians perform concerts, people buy, sell and rent virtual land, run businesses, and have legal disputes. People even play games within Second Life, as well as have traditional developers and coders within the game itself. There’s even porn.

What does it all mean? Is it just a game as many characterise it? Is it an OS or application platform as some people have suggested? Perhaps they’re both right. Myself, I view it as simply providing spatial references to the concept of “cyberspace”. (Perhaps we can call it “cybatial” if we want to get geeky). In Roger Clarke’s excellent work, Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lost, he points out that “various experiences of using the Internet have” a “common” them, namely that “participants indulge in a ’shared hallucination’ that there is a virtual place or space within which they are interacting”. This is, incidently, where I thought that Second Life was a hallucinogen, but obviously the idea of Second Life being a drug applies to the internet as a whole.

The real significance of Second Life is that it has carried out what McLuhan termed the narcissus effect, named after the mythical story of Narcissus who saw his reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it, eventually dying as he was unable to tear himself from gazing at the reflection. As he says in Understanding Media, “in the true Narcissus style, one is hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form”. What Second Life has accomplished is to amputate the physical bodies of its participants. You’re no longer just going to a webpage from your browser, you’re walking to a store or flying to a conference on an island.

What Second Life demonstrates is what the Internet of Things may well look like. Second Life 2.0 (as in the unknown future incarnation of Second Life or an equivalent) will be not just about amputating ourselves, but also our real-world objects once they are embedded with RFID, as well as places and locations. A virtual-world representation of the physical world is not too hard to imagine where you’re able to walk around your own home, invite guests over and have them interact with whatever you have in your house all within the confines of your computer. Got a new widescreen plasma? You buy it from the store, log online, and you can show it off to your virtual neighbours. Perhaps you could pop on some VR goggles and really walk around looking at a 3D representation of your home, design a few objects in Second Life, and have a fabber create them for you, all while a friend from Australia sits on your couch talking to you. Hey, nice Plasma.

As Cypher says in The Matrix, “It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going byebye”.

I even suspect that real world geospatial data will be transplanted into “cyberspace”, meaning you could have a situation where you could physically interact with the real world - walking down the street, for example - but actually be viewing yourself in the game. Imagine: being able to live in a game, forever, that exists parallel to the real world. It’s not hard to conceive, because it does seem to be happening, slowly but surely, and Second Life is simply another sign of this, a reflection in the pool, not just of ourselves, but increasingly of our world.