I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life

Chapter . “Why Don’t You Spend Time Talking to People in Person?”

	“We feel that the defining characteristic of cyberspace is the sharedness of the virtual environment, and not the display technology used to transport users into that environment.”
	--Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat, 1990

In 2002, a company named Linden Lab, based in San Francisco, implemented an idea that had been floating around the Bay Area for almost a decade. It believed that if it offered people the appropriate tools and infrastructure and gave them free access to these tools, users of this system would create a parallel, virtual online world. In a very literal sense, this would be a cyberspace, inhabited by avatars. Linden Lab was ...