MEHopper / About / MIT / Cosma / Knowledge Gates
For better or worse, pornography typically drives the early development of new media forms. Second Life, a successful virtual world, poses no challenge to this observation—in fact, the developers play to it. However, there are many sites with educational content that receive little traffic and never appear in the popular places list. The goal of The Knowledge Gates to Second Life is to expedite the transformation of a new media form from a pornography-driven state towards a form recognized for educational content. The Knowledge Gates are two strategically located virtual spaces that employ a “theme park” metaphor. The parks are populated with “magic gates” that link to hundreds of other sites. The objective is to increase the traffic of those places enough to impact the makeup of the popular places list and thus the perceived make-up and purpose of SecondLife itself from a place for pornography to a land of knowledge.
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The Knowledge Gates to SecondLife (Media in Transition 5@MIT)