Who Should be the Police in Second Life?

The virtual reality created by the internet technology provides us a second life where we can do almost all the practices in our first lives. We get information, make friends, finish work, study, shopping, even dating in that world.

Most of the time, we are overwhelmingly happy to see the online virtual world is becoming more and more real that we can do everything as we do in real life. We build up community where we share thoughts with friends. We bring classroom into the virtual world where the studying experience become more interesting and efficient. We made trade and shopping online open to everyone with easy click in front of your computer. All these improvements we achieved in virtual world make it as a real society. However, we all know that conflicts and problems always come out in real life when there existing so many needs and wants. It is the same with the second life in virtual world that we built. Online harassment, assault, fraud and any other kind of activities that concerned with people’s rights is not uncommon for everyone. Therefore, when we can resort to lawyers, police and laws in first life, who is responsible for dealing with the same problems in our second lives.

This is actually a question that hard to find a definite answer, because online activities in virtual world all take place within a much larger scale of people than in real life and the anonymity provides too much freedom for people’s behavior. When the virtual world activities are more like real life practice and more serious, with more and more people join in second life activities out of different purposes and needs, it may cause terrible problems due to some anonymous’ irresponsible and detrimental behavior. As I mentioned in last class about the young guy who looked for medical suggestion online in China and died because of someone’s irresponsible suggestions, it was really the first time that such reports got the nation-wide attention about the “anonymity”, “laws” and “responsibility” in second life. This case was brought to the court afterwards, but no specific laws had been made and no one or institution claimed responsibility for this. A young life was lost in second life.

According to the news I mentioned above and what happened afterwards, it really warned people that to deal with such problems in second life is more complicated than in first life. First of all, virtual world is like real life society but with just decades of years’ development, so it takes long time to make regulations, disciplines, laws and clear and strict distribution of responsibility. It is the must that we need to do for virtual world. Second, during the process that the virtual world is being improved, our awareness of the rule of “anonymity” in second life is essential in preventing more problems. Knowing that no responsibility is taken by anonymous people when you make friends, spend money or take other people’s words seriously, you can stay relatively safe in virtual world.