Knowledge Communities and World Building

Knowledge communities in Second Life apply the skills they’ve learned in the real world to contribute to building Second Life’s virtual world. In true collaborationist fashion, Second Life makes building tools available for users of every skillset through the Second Life wiki, and the Second Life community page. Second Life users who are experienced in building contribute to, and are featured on pages that walk users through building basics like choosing the shape to begin world building, and the location in-world, to build. This draws on a point Jenkins (2006) makes in Convergence Culture, in that, “knowledge communities form around mutual intellectual interests; their members work together to forge new knowledge often in realms where no traditional expertise exists” (p. 20). In Second Life, knowledge communities contribute their expertise, alongside the expertise of Second Life support staff to share step-by-step building information with those in the community.

The very nature of knowledge communities is large-scale, and collaborative (Jenkins, 2006). Media convergence requires the active participation of knowledge communities, with different results according to whether knowledge communities dispense, or apply knowledge. This is true of Second Life. With so much of its content created by users, a number of communities within Second Life are interconnected according to user interest. In addition to world-building as a hobby, Second Life users create worlds that offer the support, and community that some users do not have access to in the real world. This occurs when members of a knowledge community work together to apply the expertise of their members, forming collective intelligence.



Image of Second Life's Pond at Appleberry from Coby Foden's Flickr


References

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York, NY:

New York University Press.

Second Life. (2014, December 23). Create in second life [Video file]. Retrieved from


Second life community. (2019). Build tools [Data file]. Retrieved from


Second Life wiki. (2019). Good building practices [Data file]. Retrieved from



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