Reply to comment

In my eight months on Second Life, I’ve never met a Linden. Why would I need to? I rarely have technical issues that can’t be resolved by rebooting and I haven’t attended RL conferences. The closest I’ve come is in December 2007, when I submitted an AR concerning a stalker.

Apparently, meeting a Linden is a very big deal. When a Linden showed up at a sim I visiting in late December, four people I was iming within that sim all wrote the equivalent of, “OMG A Linden!” My response to each: “Someone’s probably having a technical issue.” This hardly stifled the onslaught of speculation. Who was in trouble? What were they doing here? One person, to my amusement, was very upset that the Linden in question did not respond back in public chat when they said “hi.” Were they “e-dissed?”

I clearly remember the first time I was surprised to see someone in public. Frequenting the WSE at the time, I was with standing with a group on the ‘trading floor,’ when Delicious Demar appeared. This was a very big deal. When Demar appeared next to then-CEO Kristjan Flanagan,of the now-rolled back Kristjan Flanagan Enterprises (KFE), investors and ‘virtual analysts’ stopped in their tracks. Public chat turned to a unified acknowledgment of Demar’s presence. Again, my IMs became speculations of what brought Demar to the trading floor. My response: “She’s an advisor in KFE.” Rational explanation or not, I was nonetheless awed. The same would happen later to a lesser extent, with Casper Trebuchet.

Months later, when SL CAPEX reopened, Nobody Fugazi arrived. I’d never met Fugazi and didn’t place the name. As per usual, someone I was IMing was ‘star struck.’ The funny thing about this is that the person making such a big deal of Nobody Fugazi’s presence was, in fact, a reputable CEO.

Last week, I experienced the ‘virtual celebrity effect’ twice. Once at Greenies, during a Jax Streeter concert. When Streeter named off names of people in the audience, it had a dumbfounding effect on concertgoers. The latter is a traditional response to a celebrity acknowledging a fan, but with a virtual twist. On the second occasion, I was visiting a friend I’d not seen since two weeks after creating Second Life. Showing her what I’d been up to with Y2P, she realized that one of my fellow writers was none other than Sarah Nerd. Her reaction prompted me to ask Sarah if she had time to say hello- Sarah was happy to oblige.

I’ve never understood the celebrity effect very well. Breaching RL a bit, I’ll say that I was raised in a tradition of egalitarianism. Of course, this hasn’t stopped me from being ‘caught up’ in the ‘buzz’ created by some well-known figure’s arrival. Sign of my immersion in SL Culture? I have no idea.

While I fully recognize that not everyone in SL -or everyone that reads this website- has had a ‘brush with greatness’ or perceived it as such, what interests me the most is that some very prominent individuals in SL look to other prominent individuals as Lindens in their own right.