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Those of us who art part of the Second Life community are used to negative publicity.
For years the media has been filled to the rim with scare and shock stories about lots of dirty, kinky, disgusting and generally weird stories.
And lets be fair, there is a lot in Second Life that most people will find disturbing or at least odd.

But so is reality, and internet, and tv, and books… have you ever heard of ‘Lady chatterley’s lover’?
Disgusting!
And don’t get me started on that pervert Shakespeare….

But somehow when it comes to Second Life, we just don’t seem to be able to shake that bad reputation, so many “journalists” keep writing about that side of our virtual world, as if that is all there is and has been for over a decade.

Still, it can be annoying, even infuriating when yet another bit of lazy journalism rears its ugly head and this article on a website I’d never heard of called “moviepilot“, takes the biscuit.

I guess the writer Marlon McDonald was told to quickly write some ‘click bait’ and to finish it in 20 minutes.
Or at least I hope so, it doesn’t seem like a lot of effort was put into his article.

When I first read it I thought it was a story from 2007, with matching images.
But no, it was written yesterday.
The screenshots though…. the first one isn’t even from SL but from IMVU!
Which is telling…

It is quite obvious that the writer just wanted to write a little dirty story about the adult sort of pervy side of Second Life.
Which, let me say it again, is absolutely not my cup of tea but I also don’t care about what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own sim.
But it does annoy me when people make it seem like that is all there is to Second Life.
Because it is not part of my Second Life and even those only involved with the adult entertainment part of SL know very well that there is so much more to our virtual world.

In his conquest for a little story Mr. McDonald did manage to find the Second Life destination guide, because that is where the first (non IMVU) picture comes from.
That sort of gives the game away.
He saw the list of all the types of sims we have in SL yet he only seems to have found the kinky sims.
If… he bothered to actually try SL at all and just randomly snatched a few pictures of the internet.

The most recent picture used in that article is from 2010, 4 years ago.
Try using a 4 year old screenshot when writing about any other game…
And clearly it wasn’t even made with a half decent computer.
The oldest picture is from 2007.
Yes even the ‘flying penises’ story was mentioned, something that happened 7 years ago!

Now, if this was an article about the ‘darker’ side of Second Life as it used to be and how it looked several years ago, it might have made a little sense.
Especially if the writer had bothered to write about how things have changed since then.
Because these days even the sexy side of Second Life has decent graphics!

This is a story about what Second Life was like several years ago, but nowhere in the article this is mentioned.
By “forgetting” to share that information, uninformed readers may think that Second Life still looks that way, but even worse, that adult entertainment is all there is.

A good journalist who wants to write about this side of SL would at least mention that there is more to SL and that the images are a bit outdated.

This article is everything journalism shouldn’t be; unfair and unbalanced.
Sadly, this is what journalism often is, not just when it comes to SL.

My story here is not one about yet another negative cliche ridden article about our SL, it is about one that is the mother of them all.
And I feel that it is up to all of us to make sure that people who write this nonsense are confronted.
Not just because bad journalists need to be called to order but also because people who read this drivel will perhaps also read our comments and thus get confronted with the other side of the story.

So go on, do your bit, leave a comment, tell people what SL is really like.
Defend your world.

moviepilot story