Virtual Worlds Case Study:

Digital Media Symposium

As part of its commitment to enhancing the community within Second Life, the NMC hosted a 12-day symposium on the NMC Campus in Second Life focusing on the impact of digital media on all aspects of our daily lives. At the intersection of virtual 3-D space and the “flat-web” of the browser, virtual worlds like Second Life are active settings for collaboration and socialization. The Symposium on the Impact of Digital Media explored the ways we encounter and understand digital media — inside such a setting.

The virtual symposium was informed by the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, a two-year project in which the NMC is helping to explore the impact of digital media on our lives in a variety of ways, and encouraging dialog among experts, visionaries, and thought leaders from around the globe. This unique event brought that dialog to the current residents of Second Life. The symposium was also a precursor to the NMC Online Conference on Digital Media (October 24-25), which reflected some of the same themes.

The event ran from Tuesday, October 10 through Saturday, October 21. The 12 days of activities culminated in a live presentation on the NMC Campus by Howard Rheingold, author of SmartMobs, among many other books and articles, on October 21. The singular focus of symposium was to consider how the applications of digital media are changing our lives, and how they have impacted the ways we work, learn, collaborate, and even socialize.

Recurring themes were:

• Identity and self-image
• Credibility and the reliability of Information
• Civic and social involvement
• The arts, creativity, and design
• Social networking
• Pedagogical potentials and implications

Digital media, for this event, was interpreted broadly as anything from the traditional uses of the medium for creating and sharing rich content to the explosion of blogs for self expression, and increasingly, real time interpretation of news and breaking events.