BREAKING NEWS: VOICE IS LIVE IN SL! MUTE BUTTON VOTED MOST LIKELY TO BE NEXT BROKEN FEATURE.
Aside from the fact that voice communication has been added to the main viewer (as an optional update), the above is completely false. At least, as far as I know. Which is not far at all.
Thankfully, controls have been added to manage voice capability on a per-parcel/estate basis, thus allowing those areas where voice would be a hindrance to the SL experience to simply disable it. The sky, it would seem, is not actually falling despite what some would have us believe. Or at least, the sky is still somewhat half-heartedly propped up.
The arguments for and against voice communication in SL are far too numerous (and enumerated in many locations already) for me to detail them here. Suffice it to say, you will not be hearing my voice in SL any time soon. This is partly because I’m a hopeless misanthrope, but also because I value the anonymity provided by the interwebs. I am, or rather, prefer to be, just another face in the virtual crowd. I also value the written word as a form of communication, despite the fact that I do my best to offend the gods of literacy with every entry in this blog.
The internet and the virtual world have, in a sense, reduced our ability to communicate to the modern equivalent of guttural intonations commonly associated with less civilized proto-humans (with all apologies to Geico’s cavemen). This of course does not apply to all who communicate via electronic text transmissions, but it certainly is not helped by the proliferation and profusion of this communicative form. That it is so widely available and easily accessible necessarily means that even the least capable among us has the ability to transmit his or her thoughts to a vast audience. This usually comes across as: “u r teh seksy! u want 2 cyber?” In the context of this discussion, it is not so much the content of the message that I find offensive as it is the actual structure of the message itself.
Shorthand is certainly useful for transcribing events, discussions, meetings and so forth in such a manner that the person doing the transcribing can easily and accurately recall the substance and detail of the original event. As a means of communication, however, it falls very short indeed (pun intended). While I don’t believe that those who attempt to communicate via this virtual-world shorthand actually speak the same way, I am led to believe that there are very few of them who have anything worth hearing to say. Thus I take the absolutist approach of choosing to ignore all voice communications in SL based on the assumption that most voice communications will be callow at best. You are free to disagree with this approach, as some undoubtedly will.
The bottom line is simply this: If you want to chat with me, take the time to learn the QWERTY keyboard layout (exceptions made, of course, for non-english speaking residents) and expect a rather terse and dis-interested reply to any sentence containing the letter “u” in place of the only slightly longer “you.”
O RLY?!?
-Naeko
Lao Shu 