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December 26, 2006
Web storytelling
Web storytelling: Clay Shirky dissects how "everybody knows" things which aren't really true... in this case it's "some popular virtual worlds have more than a million members". Linden Labs issues stats when they reach one million "residents" in their world Second Life. Top commercial reporters read this as "a million unique customers", "1.3 million members", more. (Avatars aren't people -- one unique visitor can create many avatars -- and not all unique visitors to a site would become ongoing members of the group, much less paying members.) Clay then talks about how the disincentives for news outlets to correct their "fake but true" stat can lead some readers to come to such strong belief that they'll then resist any subsequent corrections. Jeff Linden has since clarified what he intends by the label "resident", and the site's front page contains information on how many of those avatars were recently active, but Clay's article is a good case study on how even a flawed story can become the actual reality we deal with, day to day, talking with others on the web.
Posted by JohnDowdell at December 26, 2006 02:03 PM
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