Institute For The Future

Digital Capitalizaton, San Francisco Bay Area, USA, Holli, 12/11/08

Family context: Holli, 41 lives with her husband AJ and three cats in their home in a gated community in a Bay Area suburb.  Both work from home—Holli primarily in their large living room with two laptops (work and personal) and the big screen TV muted through network dramas, and AJ in an upstairs office.  They both often carry their computers into the garage, where they smoke, listen to music and keep working, chatting, etc.  Holli’s mother and her female partner and one of her three brothers, his wife and their newborn child live with in five miles; while her father and his male partner and her other two brothers live across the country.  

Over the course of our three hours at her house one of their friends and her mother came into the house, settled in with their phones and laptops, fiddled with sound systems, and hung out and listened to us talk.  We came on a day when there was a live music broadcast in Holli’s club in Second Life, and her friend was there in part to attempt to fix a microphone system allow her to sing a duet with the performer (playing from a vague location Holli did not recall).  Our interview was cut short by her mother showing up and borrowing clothes for a memorial service Holli had forgotten about.  Despite the gated complex, Holli assured us that there were a number of people like this who came and went throughout the day and week.  

Domain Context:

Holli is a promoter, event planner, brand manager and “collaboration evangelist.”  She does these things both in her day job for a brand of a large Silicon Valley technology company, and in her business in Second Life.   Her progress in both her career and her “hobby business” stem from her competency in assimilating and communicating technical knowledge and in communicating it to large groups of people in a viral and even fun manner. “I’m not a visioinary,” she says, “just someone who catches on quickly.” She despite having no degree or formal education, she’s worked in high tech for nearly 20 years.  She recounted how she got her first technical job out of a temp receptionist position: in a prolonged fit of boredom, she read the manual for the new office computers and software, cover to cover.  After a week of subsequently helping everyone in the office with their questions, she was hired.  She got her current job from the reputation she had gained as the leader of a user’s community, sending out an email list of tips, events and developments to a listserv that she still manages, which now has a 1500 person distribution.  Her “day job” or “real-time” job involves extensive travel for demonstrations and trainings, correspondence with customers, managing many internal collaboration and communication processes, and keeping current on technical developments in her product lines. 

She first learned about Second Life through a colleage at work in 2006.  On her third day in the world she bought virtual property and decided to master SL with the same voracity that she masters other things.  After “working” as a stripper in a SL club owned by her brother and a friend, she figured out what she did and did not want to do with her property, and started a “romantic” jazz music club.  She DJs, hires DJs, hires and contracts with musicians who stream live, plays video and sound clips.  Early afficianados of her venue took jobs (with shifts) paid in Linden dollars (Lds) to manage events and atmosphere, DJ, “bartend”.  At the urging of some of these managers she created art gallery and mall space, where artists and businesses (mostly selling scripts for avatar hair, clothing, and skins) rent her space for a monthly fee.  She astutely games the culture of “impulse buying” n SL, although she admits she falls victim to it herself.

One thing should be noted, however:  her SL “business” is not making any money.  In fact, it is costing her at least $300 a month now, and that is after the financial crisis prompted her to reconsider her previous $1600/mo expenditures on the venture.  While she insists she is investing in a future in which virtual worlds feature prominently, she acknowledges that her SL venture amounts to a very expensive hobby business—with no concrete plan for becoming profitable.  She is recently trying to re-brand herself as a promoter and event manager for other venues and companies in second life, leveraging her reputation for this both in her day job and at her SL club.  She has a few companies interested, and this is her clearest plan for translating her skills and investments into supportive wealth. 

Immersed in Social Networking Media

Social networking is both her career and her passion.  She identifies its roots in knowledge management problems for large organizations like her employer, capturing informal, tacit expertise and experience.  She experienced in her career the blossoming of this technical, dusty concern into a “fun” field of collaboration, connection, friendliness and reciprocity.  Between her working life, her friends-and-family social life and the overlapping SL business and social life, she uses at least 38 different social networking and communication services and support tools.  (That’s 7 IM clients, non-integrated, 4 email clients, a website, 5 blogs, 3 microblogs, 4 social networking sites, 3 video and photo sharing services, 1 social bookmarking service, and four music streaming and upload services, 2 document sharing and collaboration services, and 3 programs that allow her to both produce and share video and audio streams).  Only three of those are paid services. Each of these is divided between her online handle (her SL identity) and her work, but not in a particularly simple way.  Most of the time (when she is not overwhelmed by her day job and working 70-80 hours a week) she updates all of these at least once a week. 

Frustrating futures:

Although one of Holli’s greatest business strengths is her patience with the indirect relationship between social capital—knowledge, ejoyment, affinities—and monetary value, her difficulty at actually making money with this showed through as frustration at several points.  She was frustrated with artists who try to ply a fee-for-service model for themselves, but do not recognize the promotion work she does for them as a service for which SHE should be compensated.  Above all she was frustrated with Linden Labs, who is, she asserted, doing all the wrong things with their economy.  Their expansion of virtual property well beyond the demand for it has devalued private properties like hers.  Much like her suburban house, which she expected to flip for another home after five years, selling her property is just not an option, as she can’t in the foreseeable future get what she paid for them.  The conversion rate of Ld’s to USD and back also hasn’t been adjusted to match the deflation of the dollar—so she is operating in what amounts to a hostile foreign currency.  Aggregation of her fragmented social online presence, and a recognition of the value of her services, are her two brightest hopes for her future in this area. 

General insights:

- Capitalization of digital goods may not materialize in the ways expected and popularized by experts, media and designers, as different stakeholders pursue different models of value recognition, sometimes at odds with each other

- Fragmentation of social media is a frustrating experience, but could provide essential diversification of online presence if any one medium goes awry or tanks--the valuable relationships travel across many different media

While this is certainly a Digital Cap story, Social currencies and intimacy came through in many places.

-“Attention” is definitely a social currency here. 

What is interesting about Holli is that she is very adept at seeing the potential of bridging personal attention—what she craves and gets when people dance with her at her club—with attention that she can direct.  Products, artists, ideas are all things towards which she can channel attention in the way that she presents herself, frames her interactions, creates spaces and events that attract people, and works her social networks.  She understands the mechanisms of leisure experience well enough from her experience and observations to be able to create not just “marketing” or “retail” space, but an environment that is leisurely enough to attract large numbers of people who don’t mind their attention being leveraged for the promotion of goods, services, and performers.