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...]