I’ve been reading “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson. It’s the sci-fi book that actually spawned “Second Life”. I wasn’t reading it to jump back aboard the “excitement to this kinda sucks” train I rode through Second Life, but because I am a sci-fi junkie and Stephenson is brilliant.
Reading it does though stir up a lot of memories about how cool Second Life was supposed to be. The first true mash up of life and technology, where ANYTHING is possible. So I’ve been thinking a lot about why it didn’t work, on a commercial level, and more directly, why didn’t it have the success of other social sites? Lots of reasons of course. In Stephenson’s book you are “goggled” in and experiencing the “metaverse” in true virtual reality. You don’t have to sit at your computer for 20 minutes while it loads, and then use the arrow keys to fly off to nowhere. But as I thought more about what the other social sites offer that Second Life didn’t, I kept coming back to one thing, that I’ll call “anticipated gratification”.
I think human beings have been hard wired for anticipated gratification, and I think facebook, twitter, and previously myspace have learned how to bottle it up. What I mean is this; When I was 10 years old I had a pen pal in Wales. Never met her, but she wrote wonderful letters with big words and sent me pictures. Immediately upon receipt of these letters, I would run up to my room, read them 5 times, and then write back. I would then hand the letter off to Mom to drop at the post office. Then, I wait. That period before I get the letter back, is, to me, anticipated gratification. That feeling is an extremely present and powerful human emotion. If someone told me I could multiply that same emotion by 1000 times I would certainly want to hear more. I would argue that this is what facebook, twitter, text messaging, and all this other stuff have done. If anyone tells me,that after they post something interesting on facebook, that they don’t look forward to a response, I would say they are lying. It’s that same anticipated gratification I had when waiting for my pen pals letter. The anticipation, many times, is better than the response. Twitter allows you to experience “hits” of anticipated gratification 100 times a day, surely triggering a little dopamine release that makes you want just a little more. I think one of the questions is how much is too much? I’m sure it varies for everyone.
Back to my main point here. What’s one of the reasons Second Life didn’t succeed commercially, while other social environments did? There is no anticipated gratification. As soon as you send the letter you get the response. The mystery, the waiting, the anticipation is removed. Maybe we just weren’t ready for that yet. Maybe these social networks are training us to be ready to be fully “goggled in” when the time comes, and anticipated gratification flows in real time.
