IP Democracy: Mark Warner to Appear Today on Second Life

This election season has seen a lot of Internet firsts — candidates podcasting, flocking to YouTube, posting MySpace profiles and distributing campaign literature under Creative Commons licenses. Now, unofficial Democratic presidential candidate Mark Warner will appear today on hot virtual world site Second Life. Governor Warner will appear, as is required, in animated avatar form (see picture) at 3:30 pm.

Warner sees a role for virtual world social communities in the democratic process.

“Social technologies can be great tools for political change, and virtual worlds like Second Life might be the next tool for engaging people in the real world democratic process,” said Governor Warner. “We want to use Second Life to continue the conversation about the direction of our country. My avatar is also pretty funny looking. That alone makes it worth checking out.”

While Governor Warner may think his avatar is “funny looking,” W. James Au, a former “embedded journalist” at Second Life who will be interviewing Warner, thinks he looks “presidential” in animated form.

Mark Warner’s avatar seems presidential, too—tall, stern, and statesman-like.

The event was proposed by Warner’s Forward-Together PAC and is being produced by Millions of Us, a firm dedicated to “helping businesses understand and harness the power of virtual worlds.”

(Tip to Cory Doctorow.)

Update: OK, being a newbie to Second Life, I tried for about 30 minutes to figure out how to get my avatar off “Orientation Island” and into some kind of auditorium where Mark Warner was speaking. The best I could do was fly and wave my arms around and make my avatar say “you there” to equally aimless and bumbling avatars all hemmed inside a fenced corral. My advice to Mark Warner’s team and the Second Life people: next time, please help us lame neophytes with some kind of instructions.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on August 31, 2006 11:19 AM to IP Democracy