{"id":2645,"date":"2013-01-24T19:39:21","date_gmt":"2013-01-24T19:39:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=2645"},"modified":"2013-01-24T19:39:21","modified_gmt":"2013-01-24T19:39:21","slug":"those-who-seek-offence-will-find-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=2645","title":{"rendered":"Those Who Seek Offence Will Find It"},"content":{"rendered":"

I can remember when I was a lad in Second Life that I had a PG parcel. One day, I noticed that next door a Gentleman’s club had opened and I wasn’t happy about this. The outside of the building and even the wording on the parcel was more risque then explicit but hey, this isn’t PG I thought. Stepping onto the parcel I realised the parcel was in a neighbouring sim and on further examination I realised that the neighbouring sim was mature. This was back in the days of only having maturity ratings of PG and Mature.<\/p>\n

Now this made the PG rating of my parcel, meaningless, however the neighbouring parcel was not breaking any rules. I decide to pack up shop there and sell the PG parcel. I mentioned the silliness of this situation to a Linden, who agreed that said situation was silly and had been discussed.<\/p>\n

Quite a few moons later Linden Lab unleashed the adult category, as with many Linden Lab ideas it had good intentions but was delivered in a very poor fashion. However now we have three maturity ratings, the issue of General sims neighbouring Moderate sims still exists, but adult sims are in their own category and we can filter adult results in our preferences, we can exclude them totally, this is a better situation than we had before because Mature or as it’s known now, Moderate, has quite a wide scope, so excluding adult helps to avoid the more extreme content.<\/p>\n

I’m reminded of this because I’ve just read an article, which I’m not going to link to, that complains about extreme adult content in Second Life and in this article, to demonstrate that extreme adult content exists, the author set their preferences to adult and listed events, which included adult content. They also searched for a particular type of extreme adult content and then published the results, with outrage. I’m sorry but if you go out of your way to search for extreme adult content, you’re hardly in a position to complain about finding it. The author could try unticking safe search on Google and searching for similar results, the results will be shocking too.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Those who seek offence, will easily find it and this is the situation with this article. There is content within Second Life that I find offputting, but I know that if I search with adult filters turned on (no pun intended) that I’m likely to find adult content amongst the search results and some of that content may not be my cup of tea.<\/p>\n

I recently blogged about visiting a roleplaying sim that had the sort of content I’m not a fan of, I was grateful this was explained via the welcome notecards at the sim landing point. The sim in question was adult, to have complained about said content when I knew ahead of teleporting there that it was an adult sim, would be churlish in the extreme.<\/p>\n

The author also complains that this content puts off serious business and educators. Tier pricing and justifying usage puts off educators, but a cursory search for education in Second Life retrieves more results than the search term the author of the other article was offended by:<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a>
Education Search<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Educators are still using Second Life and as for big business, they ignore the extreme adult content on the world wide web because they can make good business use of it. They would do the same in Second Life if they could make good business use of it.<\/p>\n

There are from time to time reports of activity that breaches the Terms Of Service, this sort of activity should be reported. However there’s also content that some people simply don’t like, urging people to abuse report said content is not responsible, nor is it helpful. People may well want to campaign to have content they don’t like removed, personally I move along, as I always have when I see objectionable content, but if you want to campaign about content you don’t like, raise sensible points, don’t go around urging people to abuse report content that does not fall outside the TOS.<\/p>\n

Scylla Rhiadra used to be a very vocal critic of certain types of content in Second Life and would argue against its existence. Scylla was part of SL Left Unity and its offshoot of The Left Unity Feminist Network<\/a>. I’m not sure how active such groups are in Second Life these days or if Scylla is even still around. There are ways and means of making your points, but I don’t agree with AR parties for content that isn’t against the TOS.<\/p>\n

Second Life has a very grown up attitude to adult content in the main, Linden Lab accept that it’s here, they provide us with filters, it’s a sensible compromise, going out of your way to find content that will offend you, isn’t very sensible.<\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a>
\n