Wagner James Au has been an embedded journalist on SL since 2004. In an exclusive interview with Jack Myers Media Business Report he provided commentary on the online world's evolution, and insight into how it will profoundly impact life in the physical world.

BusinessWeek's May 2006 cover story on Second Life was the tipping point. The article "fired up the corporate interest in SL as a marketing platform, and for better or worse, that also spurred on the mainstream media. Feedback loop from there, and now we're over a million”, says Au.

But who is "we"? Au points out "there's still quite a few new users coming into SL who are 'early adopter' in the fundamental understanding of the term - people who are comfortable with Second Life's fairly steep learning curve (certainly for high-level content creation like scripting and complex building). At the same time, they have even more casual social gamers who're just looking for a fun place to have parties and dance. So it's a strange and unique mix marrying 70 percent from the AOL demographic and 30 percent from the Boing Boing/Slashdot/Kotaku demographic."

Asked to describe SL for different demographic groups, Au offers a trio of high concept pitches: "Teen People: it's a 3-D MySpace; Conde Nast Traveler: it's a world that looks like all the places described in this magazine. AARP is tougher: it's like the Web, except in 3-D computer animation like a Pixar movie that you get to be in, be whatever you want, and build whatever you like."

Not Your Father's Videogame

What distinguishes SL from other massively multiplayer (MMP) games is that while it takes advantages of the freedoms that gaming provides (you can fly, even teleport), there are no objectives. It's all about creating new identities and lives online. Residents, as they are called, meet, work, fall in love. And yes, they transact business. What makes Second Life unique is that, six months after its launch, its founders permitted residents to retain their Intellectual Property. What they create is theirs. When one visits Second Life for the first time, there is only a small fee. You are provided with a basic "avatar" - a virtual extension of yourself that may mirror your actual physical self, an idealized version (you with a killer personal trainer and/or Dr. 90210 on retainer), or an utter reinvention (in terms of gender, sexuality, age, even species). The fun begins with customization, or "modding" (for modification). On Second Life, while your behavior defines your being, you simultaneously fashion your identity from the outside in - purchasing skins, clothing, accessories, even a personality. Soon we'll start to see products that were born on Second Life migrate to the physical world.

Brands Start From Scratch

Since appearance counts on Second Life, its earliest entrepreneurs have found particular success in developing its Red Light District, complete with gambling and sex shops. After an upgrade enabled residents to stream their desktop music into their Second Life world, dance clubs opened throughout the burg. Naturally, entertainment is big in this world. SonyBMG built their Media Island and are hosting launch parties and lives chats. Ben Folds "appeared" in October 2006 and other well-known singers and groups are performing regularly in Second life as the residents' avatars sit in the audience and watch/listen.

While Sony is on the right track with Media Island, Au cautions that it has many rivers to cross. "At the moment, a big brand like Sony will get you a nice thirty-minute diversion." Residents will show up, take a look at the content, and unless it's truly powerful, engaging and built to last, they'll leave to find the next diversion. It's not that the corporate content is of questionable quality, "it's just that residents churn through content so quickly, and unless there's a real sense of ongoing interactivity, they quickly get the idea in 15 to 30 minutes, and move on. Why hang out in an empty Sony kiosk when you can have a freeform build session in the sandbox with your friends?"

Welcome to the New Frontier, Folks.

While eBay'ers and videogame players can "purchase reputations," it's the other way around on Second Life, Au suggests. "Proven creativity purchases reputation. Even real life celebrity only gets you so far. A new user comes in, and within the space of a few weeks, they're the talk of Second Life's veteran user base. And time and again, it's because they've created some truly unique content, or in some cases, a truly unique persona." Au points to a British resident named Robbie Dingo, who very shortly after joining SL earlier this year, had created a) virtual music instruments that actually work, b) a cool and somewhat dark game of Russian Roulette, c) truly moving machinima and d) artificial marijuana plants that respond to sunlight and water, all of which caused a massive stir. "He's famous and part of that Second Life elite by sheer creative force," Au adds. Dingo’s success was built on his ability to make emotional connections with other residents.

In this Virtual World, the traditional corporate model is at a disadvantage. As Au notes, they "only have money. I suppose if they really want to they could dedicate a staff to competing, but then, they're really at a disadvantage to a young mother on a farm with enormous talent and willingness to create a name for herself, and for whom even making $30,000 would be considered success." The platform itself is the equalizer.

These operating systems function within us like separate governments that co-exist but also conflict. Within each operating system is a "treasury department" that manufactures currencies: in the brain the currency is thoughts; in the heart and gut, the currency is emotions. Thoughts and emotions are the gas that powers our engines, but in our culture and society we have learned to repress our emotions and not trust our feelings. To be fair, we're also often advised to "keep our thoughts to ourselves," but few of us actually follow that advice.

When it comes to running and ruling the world as we experience it every day, the brain has become omnipotent. Of course, we make gut decisions and follow our hearts, but how often does an executive, government official, teacher, computer engineer or anyone else act on their gut instinct or heart's desire?

The conflict between emotions and intellect drive many of our greatest challenges. Warriors are spurred on with propaganda messages that target emotional commitments rather than intellectual. The legal system is designed to operate on facts but attorneys appeal to jurors with emotional arguments. Abortion, global warming, education… name an issue and at the core there's almost always the battle between the intellectual point-of-view and the emotional feelings the issue evokes.

Today, large governments manage decisions based on the collective brain power of their leaders. Revolutionary organizations thrive on their emotional fervor. With one group, thinking overpowers their emotions; with the other, emotions direct their actions. Traditional western societies and cultures are brain-led, driven by mental rather than emotional decisions. Eastern cultures, and many revolutionary groups, typically have emotional influences at their foundation.

Corporations are brain-led and the larger corporations become, the more brain-led they are. Except for rare exceptions, like News Corp and its gut-led leader Rupert Murdoch, companies are required to operate almost exclusively on brain-based management.

I've been studying corporate America for 25 years focusing on television, entertainment, marketing, media and advertising. In that quarter-century, I've become known for the accuracy of my forecasts and I've made more than 5,000 of them. I'm going to admit something that will probably harm the credibility of my future forecasts, but the primary tool I use to develop my predictions is not data and information; it's my gut instinct.

Yes, I gather extensive input and data. But unlike every other leading economic forecaster in the media and advertising business, I don't depend on that data to draw my conclusions. Numerous times over the past 25 years, I've overruled what the facts say and what my brain tells me and go with my gut. Usually my brains and my gut agree, but when they don't, I've learned to trust my gut. Most successful companies in any creative field like entertainment and fashion have been built on the gut instinct and heartfelt beliefs of their founders. As companies grow, they become increasingly dependent on intellectually-based programs and policies that guide brain-led management, while the more emotionally grounded founders lose influence and control. Few positions within the average corporation permit management decisions that defy the facts and intelligence and instead are based on gut instinct and feelings. Thus the demise of Ted Turner once he merged his company into Time Warner.

Married couples shift from a relationship based on the emotions that led to their initial attraction to dealing with the day-to-day pressures, financial planning issues, home building, jobs, school, children's needs and brain-led values. Emotions suffer a loss of power and influence and they rebel, causing anger and depression. Anger is usually misplaced, targeted at a spouse or at yourself. The solution is almost always to stop over-thinking the problems and get back in touch with your heart and gut. When you let them guide you to the solutions that feel best, the brain will quietly follow, depression will ebb and peace will follow.

This simplistic rule applies to almost every relationship we have in all parts of our lives. But we've lost the skills, sensitivity and commitment required to transform our decision-making and actions from brain-led to heart and gut-led. So we turn to religion, gurus, cult leaders, spiritual advisors, the latest Idiot's Guide, celebrities, sports stars and faux guides to provide us with the emotional center we're unable to find within ourselves.

In Virtual Worlds we're bringing back to humanity the power and influence of the heart and gut. Online communities like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Second Life, Cyworld and even dating sites are huge successes because they empower emotions and offer a welcome environment where the heart and gut can thrive. Repressed and depressed emotions suddenly find joy and redemption. Online social networks and communities developed around shared beliefs and interests revive and stimulate the emotions. Virtual Worlds welcome us into a new society that devalues the intellectual stimuli and rewards emotional connections.

Today's social networks and virtual worlds are in their infancy. Virtual Worlds of the future will emulate life and foster relationships and interaction; and success in these worlds will be based on emotional rather than intellectual skills. For participants and marketers seeking to influence them, traditional brain-based methods and behaviors will be useless. But advertisers who have retained emotional connections as the foundation of their strategies will thrive.

Surviving these changes — learning to breathe the new virtual air — will be easy, just as new media technologies have become second nature for most of us. As Wi-Fi Clouds and Ultra Wi-Fi become commonplace… as mobile devices become an elegant extension of the home video center… as wireless communications becomes the norm… as chips are literally embedded in our bodies so we no longer require bulky phones or iPods… as our brains learn to discern and process digital signals… as our bodies become our own personal energy sources… we will quickly adapt and wonder how we lived without these advances.

Our emotional DNA is being rewired.

Advertisers Catch Onto
Rewiring the Emotional DNA

Leave it to advertisers to be first to catch onto changes in the human emotional DNA. Advertisers, who have relied almost exclusively on data and scientific research methodologies for decision-making for all of the 20th Century, are looking elsewhere to build new advertising models in the 21st Century. With all the resources available to them for defining and reaching the best target audiences, the most likely shoppers, the optimum spenders, they are looking elsewhere to develop their advertising strategies. In the next ten years, reliance on Nielsen ratings and other behavioral data will become marginalized as marketers learn to rely instead on new measures of performance based on a combination of return-on-investment and insights on consumer emotions, passions and feelings.

Advertisers are investing millions — and soon will be investing billions — to gain a better understanding of how emotions drive decisions and what role emotions play in the products we buy, our loyalties, and the connections we make and break. The search for emotional connections inspired Sears Roebuck & Company to sponsor Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Coca-Cola and AT&T to identify themselves with American Idol, Fox to acquire MySpace for $600 million, American Express to align with the Tribeca Film Festival, Axe deodorant to sponsor disruptive media events, Saatchi & Saatchi to align its future behind Kevin Roberts' Lovemarks, and Esquire magazine to build dream bachelor pads in New York and Los Angeles. Sears and other retailers are opening retail outlets in Second Life, joining entrepreneurs who have already settled in. Marketers and corporations are embedding themselves to explore these unexplored territories.

By focusing on emotional connections, advertisers are dramatically altering traditional creative and media strategies that have been sacrosanct in the ad business for decades. Of 3,000 television commercials reviewed in 2005 and 2006, more than 2,200 offered access to additional information through a toll free phone number or URL.

The core question for these marketers is what are the emotional dynamics that motivate consumers to react to one message and not another, and how the environment in which ad messages are presented impacts on these dynamics.

Consider the process of looking at an ad message or just reading this book. The words or messages enter through the eyes and progress instantly to the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that controls intelligence, where they are processed and evaluated, activating any number of responses. Reading is an intuitive ability that we learned as children and that has become second nature. But messages — in all forms and from multiple sources — enter our experience through all our senses. We have been taught and believe they first travel to the brain, which then sends appropriate response signals to different nerve centers, organs, limbs and muscles.

In fact, scientists and psychiatrists are proving that as we read, see, smell, touch, hear and feel, messages are sent not just to the brain but simultaneously to two other emotional centers: our heart and gut. There is a small, prune-like part of the brain located under the frontal-lobes, called the insula, that is thought to register gut feelings and has recently been recognized as a critical part of a network that sustains addictive behavior such as smoking. Addicts, no matter how much they may want to change their addictive behavior, are "locked-in" by the insula. The brain has, in essence, captured dictatorial powers over emotional — and physical — well-being. As new generations learn in Virtual Worlds how to empower emotional centers to gain power and control equal to the brain, the natural evolutionary process will ultimately lead to a rebalancing of the human psyche, spirit and ego.

There are undoubtedly other emotional centers that human beings have not yet activated and that are waiting to come to life in Virtual Worlds. But we all recognize our heart and gut constantly compete with our brain. We process our emotional responses to sensory inputs separately and simultaneously in our heart and in our gut as well as in our brain. How many times have you said "I feel it in my gut" or "I'm heartsick?" The only thing we typically feel in our brain is a headache. It's a biological conflict to think about how we emotionally feel.

It's ironic, then, that we tend to deal with emotions by applying brainpower.

Why do we believe we need to sleep on decisions and allow our brains to process our feelings before we act on them?

Why do we seek mental clarity and spend billions and billions on psychiatrists and psychologists to get in touch with our feelings through our thought process, rather than finding new and better ways to listen to our hearts and guts?

Traditional identities and communities have defined civilization for centuries, but in the 21st Century a new world has opened that is radically altering how we define ourselves and how others perceive us. Second Life, Neopets, there.com, Sims, Cyworld, Kaneva, Doppelganger, MySpace, Friendster, TagWorld, Facebook, Gaia, hi5, Multiply and hundreds of new communities are being built in a completely new universe. Second Life is the first great city built in this new world, a bustling chaotic uncontrolled gathering place, like Chicago in the 19th century.

Avatars are computer images that can be human, animal or anything the imagination can conjure. You design the color, the language, the hairstyle, and the fashion right down to the underwear. Avatars are computerized Barbie and Ken dolls on steroids, self-centered with all their favorite things around them. The creator personalizes his or her avatar with an endless list of available options offered in the virtual world. Of course, they come with a cost, which you pay with currency acquired by successfully "living" in the cyber universe.

In online communities, dating sites and social networks you can be whoever you choose to be. You can create and "live" completely separate and distinct profiles. You can live in New York, Peoria, Hollywood or Seoul; on a college campus, alone or with your family. You can enter virtual communities whenever you want, turning them on and off like a TV.

Psychologists report a child's virtual self often reflects more about their core self-image than the self they display in their day-to-day behavior. Their virtual selves display their feelings about authority, their likes and dislikes unfettered by parental influence and controls. The worlds in which they immerse themselves often reflect more about their self-identities and how they want to be perceived than their more traditional activities and choices.

The 19-year old PS3 gamer who drives more miles on virtual highways and racecourses every week than on pavement and asphalt sees each of these worlds from a very different perspective. The worlds he watches from the windows of both his virtual and mechanical cars both change daily, with new billboards, buildings under construction and seasonal changes. He's engaged intellectually, stimulated emotionally and physically activated in ways that are not even closely comparable. Which world is most real to him: traditional or virtual? Where is he more comfortable and at home? In the virtual world or on a highway and congested city streets? Which world is more inviting, appealing and conducive to forming lifelong behavior patterns?

Entering a virtual world is the equivalent of an amphibian taking its first tentative steps out of water and discovering how to breathe. To the amphibian, is one world real and the other not? Is a virtual existence in Second Life or gaming sites any less "real" than time spent at a friend's home?

Most of us are more comfortable in the physical traditional world than in virtual worlds, but a growing number of young people are spending unprecedented amounts of time in a virtual existence. According to a new Myers media usage study, 72 percent of 18 to 24 year olds spend more than an hour daily online for fun and 38 percent spend more than an hour daily playing videogames. Significant and steadily increasing amounts of time are being committed to e-mail, instant messaging and text messaging. These activities, now mostly requiring separate technologies and programs, are being merged into one cross-platform all-engaging and completely immersive experience within the new Virtual Worlds that will soon be as ubiquitous as MySpace and YouTube.

Is it more or less "natural" to create an avatar for social networking in the Second Life Virtual World than starting school in a new city? Is life in a Virtual World perceived as less relevant than time spent at school, at a job or watching TV at home? Scientists, sociologists and anthropologists suggest that active social participation and involvement in online virtual worlds is a more constructive and healthy human experience than passively watching television, reading a book, or being in an unhappy job or relationship. In the next several decades, we'll find out if they are right.

Virtual worlds are becoming an embedded part of our culture and the implications for every aspect of society are unimaginable. When you enter a Virtual World you are stepping into space, into a new universe with no preparation, no training, no experience and no knowledge of what the future will bring or how it will impact you.

The Internet as we know it today is an amoebic form of a new universe that is just beginning to be explored and developed. There is an endless quest ahead that will be very real and fascinating. The Internet is opening a new world that will manifest in myriad forms, from the most simple search engines to complex and immersive virtual communities. New sites, formats and amazingly complex and absorbing cyber civilizations are on the horizon. They have the potential to radically alter the emotional code of the human race.

CHAPTER 2: Internet Alters How We Perceive Messages More than How We Receive Them

CHAPTER 3: Brain, Heart and Gut: Three Central Human Operating Systems

CHAPTER 4: Virtual Worlds are Real to Residents

CHAPTER 6: Ad Agencies and Corporations Embrace Second Life Expansion

CHAPTER 7: Virtual MTV: Completely Reinventing the Music Scene

CHAPTER 8: Wireless Is the Next Frontier

CHAPTER 9: Virtual Worlds: Rewiring Your Emotional Future

CHAPTER 10: CyberParadiseSociety.com: {A Virtual World Reader Generated Fiction}

Virtual Worlds: Rewiring Your Emotional Future also introduces the first chapter of a new "reader generated" novel: CyberParadiseSociety.com, taking readers 25-years into the future when a leading virtual world has such an enormous impact on society that it can radically alter politics, entertainment, and interpersonal relationships. Myers introduces an unfolding drama within the corporate parent of the CyberParadiseSociety virtual world, Global Paradise Games, that threatens not only the company but the millions of CyberParadiseSociety "residents." This very first "reader generated book" invites readers to submit their ideas for the next chapter, which Myers will select and publish, followed by reader submissions for each future chapter. Every writer whose chapter is selected will gain rights for participation in any future revenues for movie rights, game rights etc. Visit www.jackmyers.com for information.

A growing number of young people are spending unprecedented amounts of time in a virtual existence. Virtual Worlds are becoming an embedded part of our culture and the implications for every aspect of society are unimaginable. This 116-page easy-to-read book discusses the potential that Virtual Worlds have to dramatically alter the emotional code of the human race, and also reviews the opportunities for individuals, corporations, advertising and media companies to build personal and corporate marketing campaigns in Virtual Worlds. This first reader generated book not only will open the eyes of readers to this completely new world but, in itself, will become an immersive experience for readers that could keep them involved, engaged and emotionally connected to a virtual world community experience for years ahead.