Researching last week's column about adult webcam chat made me nostalgic for the online community I used to belong to. The conversations in the webAffairs book could have taken place in my chat room, and I examined the screenshots closely to see if I recognized any faces or other body parts.
And yet, the most familiar theme in the book was the author's personal experience. She started modestly, became a cybersex diva, then found a balance point between those two extremes. She's still a regular in her community, but spends less time online, and her chat buddies are integrated into her life like any other friends.
You're a newbie for about a week. Then you become a "reg" and you spend as much time as you can in the room, bonding with people and flirting and cybering.
And then you level off. Maybe it's that you've slaked the need that brought you there in the first place. But you balance yourself between virtual space and physical space, and you find ways to fit everything and everyone into your life without making yourself crazy.
Last time, a 12-year relationship was coming to an end. I had just started freelance writing full-time, paying my dues with high-volume, low-profit gigs like writing horoscopes and website descriptions for human-edited search engines.
Now, I have writing assignments that challenge me and a relationship that suits me well. I'm active in a dozen online discussion groups -- including the Sex Drive forum -- and I have 100 people on my Trillian contact list, 41 of whom are online right now.
A quick primer for the newbies: Second Life is not so much a game as it is a place, although it has games in it. (Some would argue with me on this; see this explanation .) You represent yourself with a 3-D avatar and can pretty much build yourself a complete life in this online world.
And unlike plain vanilla webcam chat -- or the ancient medium of text chat -- you have lots of things to view, build, buy, sell and otherwise interact with that may or may not involve interacting with other people.
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