As a self-anointed history buff, I’m always fascinated when I hear labels given to different generations. From ‘The Lost Generation’ of the early decades of the 20th century to ‘Generation X’, the somewhat illusory distinctions separating these groups of human beings, who just happen to be born into different sets of circumstances, baffles me.

Most specifically, I selfishly balk at the exalted status so freely given (and immortalized in Tom Brokaw’s book ) to ‘The Greatest Generation’, the group of Americans who grew up during the Great Depression and completed their coming-of-age during World War II. I asked a fellow history buff, my father, “Why are they so deserving of that title? What did they do that we couldn’t do?”

“Well, it’s just because of the extraordinary circumstances they were put through and overcame.”

It’s not that I feel this generation didn’t earn their meritorious title…but where’s the respect given to those of us not thrust into such infamously soul-hardening situations? How would we have responded?

Our parents, the ‘Baby Boomers’, had their share of excitement, too. From Woodstock to Wall Street, they witnessed several major American socio-political assassinations in the ’60s (including a pair of Kennedy siblings and several of our greatest African-American civil rights leaders ), either fought during or protested against the psyche-destroying madness of Vietnam , and ultimately began raising us during the fiscal boom of Reaganomics.

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In the past few years, there have been web programs similar to Second Life which have flourished at times. However, much of the reason Second Life has grown , according to those interviewed, is that this world offers a level of freedom that the others (up until only recently) don’t.

“ It’s a distinct thing to understand because Second Life is all user-created content,” Au said. “Some of the land and houses were created by the company, but 99.9% of everything you see in there is created by users. ”

Heider added, “People would go to The Sims Online and they would create their own little role-play that EA did not want and people did it anyway. But Second Life encouraged those same behaviors…a lot of people came to Second Life from The Sims Online and There.com because they felt there was more freedom in Second Life .”

Linden Labs also lets Second Life users keep the intellectual property rights to whatever they create inside the virtual world.

Second Life celebrated its fifth birthday in late June , although it has only started to garner the majority of its registered audience in the past couple years. Though a toddler in human years, the virtual world has already been around long enough to make a significant impact in many careers and in the way people interact worldwide.

Don Heider, who has been researching Second Life for three-and-a-half years for his forthcoming book Living Virtually: Researching New Worlds (Release Date: September), originally stumbled across Second Life in the Austin-American Statesman while on faculty at The University of Texas.

“As a social scientist, it blew my mind,” Heider said. “It’s like the world’s biggest Petri dish…a very interesting social experiment.

“There’s no goal, there’s no game. It just exists to create and socialize…Any social scientist would like to put 100 random people on an island and see what they’d do, and this is what (Second Life ) was.”

Wagner James Au , whose Second Life alter ego is Hamlet Linden , also studies many of the sociological aspects of the virtual world. The co-author of Second Life: The Official Guide blogged for Linden Labs and freelanced stories for other publications from SL ’s early days until he left L.L. in Feb. 2006. Though he has been busy working independently on the Making of… novel (See: last Everywhere post ) since then, Au said he typically spends “anywhere from a few hours to 20 hours” a week logged into Second Life .

“From a social engineering standpoint, you can rate people, either through their behavior or their avatar behavior,” Au said. “Instead of going around killing orcs, you just go around being yourself.

“It’s always been a job for me, the most fun writing time I’ve ever had, but what made me stay was the unlimited amount of creativity that people are allowed to bring into the world. Also, the way people rip off each other’s creativity and feed off each other.”

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One of the most direct influences for Second Life and programs like it, according to Second Life creator Philip Rosedale, is the concept of a “metaverse”, an idea pioneered by “cyberpunk” author Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash that describes a “user-defined world of general use where people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate.”

Don Heider , associate dean and associate professor of the College of Journalism at The University of Maryland, thinks that chat rooms from the Internet’s early days played an even bigger role in the development of programs like Second Life than video games.

“In terms of the way graphics and avatars move, games like World of Warcraft were more directly influential,” Heider said, “but early in the history of the Internet, people would log onto the Internet and use MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon, Domain, or Dimension) as gathering places to talk about things like Dungeons and Dragons.

“(These were) multi-participant bulletin board chat rooms where people would come together and interact that just used text but described their environments in such a detailed and complex way. I think these chat rooms probably played more of an influential factor, set more of a historic precedent than any of the current MMO RPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games).”

However, the evolution of video games also played a large role as well, especially since many of the technological-social concepts in Snow Crash were not practically applicable upon the book’s release in 1992. Around this time, computer game series such as SimCity (The Sims series) and Civilization were starting to gain popularity for their strategic PC simulations of urban and anthropological development. Early role-playing video games, such as the Final Fantasy series , were also evolving.

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During the second season of the late, great Chappelle’s Show, Dave produced a skit about how creepy and uncomfortable the Internet would be if it were a real place. People were mobbing a “free downloads” music store like it was a Calcutta soccer riot and a glamorous woman he began talking to eventually took off a mask to reveal an annoying spammer.

In the changing climate of modern media, the Internet and different kinds of “conveniences” we consume are becoming not only progressively more personalized and customized to the average user, but the technological convergence in these mediums is already becoming more sophisticated. Like Chappelle’s skit, the Internet is becoming more “real” in that it is making shopping and working increasingly more accessible and convenient; letting us control more with the click of a mouse.

Through Internet programs like Second Life , and Google’s just-launched LIvely, users are able to customize their own virtual lives in a virtual world using “avatars”, or the graphical representation of an Internet user. For the equivalent of roughly 30 (real) dollars per month (although registration on Second Life is free and available to everyone), average people from across the globe are able to escape into this existence and lead a fairly comfortable life, as they use “Linden dollars” (the Paypal-supported equivalent of real dollars on the game; named after creator company Linden Labs ) for transactions in Second Life , expenses that some users say would otherwise be spent on everyday escapes like movies and CDs.

More than just a virtual escape, Second Life , which launched in 2003, serves as much more for its users, from a social experimentation device to a recruiting tool to a cyber-conferencing tool. Media convergence components available in Second Life include visual animation, video, audio/voice and text. Linden Labs has even more recently introduced its own business networking Second Life sub-world, Second Life Grid .

For this market research (”Bizookipedia”), I interviewed several different media-related experts, each uniquely tied to this 3-D virtual world in some way, in order to shed some light on the inner workings and larger impact of this fairly new cultural phenomenon. Additionally, I conducted broad research on some of the existing literature (feature articles, blogs, etc.) for Second Life and spent some time on my own perusing this Internet world. The result is an insightful projection for the future of the Internet and how humans interact. [Bizookipedia begins...]