Turn on, tune in, opt out

Present Tense: You may have heard of Second Life, the online world in which people wander about in avatar form. They chat, build houses, sell and buy goods, and stroll or fly around the virtual landscape. A recent article in this newspaper detailed how many musicians have taken to playing virtual gigs there. Irish companies have set up pixilated offices in the place. There is such commerce that the US Inland Revenue is looking at regulating its taxes.

Reuters has a full-time journalist posting dispatches from in there. It is a cultural phenomenon - or over one million people think so. Many of them immerse themselves in it, live two lives, one of which offers the tantalising prospect of being both real and unreal. They carve out this double life over hours, day after day, month after month.

I lasted 20 minutes.

I logged in, created a character for myself and sent him strolling down a virtual hill. All the potential of this digitised universe was laid out: populated islands, other newly arrived visitors, a whole community of people from all over the world in one place. I walked under water, flew for a while, instructed my avatar to shout a rather obvious "I'm flying". And just as I was wondering whether anyone could hear me, my computer crashed. Which was fine by me. I had been a virtual tourist, just taking a quick gawk.

Like someone on an airport stopover who jumps in a cab, takes a snap of the skyline, and races back to the airport again content at having ticked another city off the list.

And so it occurred to me that a pattern is developing in how I approach certain new trends and technological wonderments - a growing habit for diving into something, enjoying it, telling people how much I enjoyed it, and then abandoning it.

There was, for example, a quick experiment with blogging some months back, in which I created a site, posted a couple of observations on current events and even got a few responses. Someone asked me would I be updating the blog regularly. You bet, I told them.

That promise, of course, was the last I wrote on the thing.

Around that time I also became enamoured by Skype, which allows you make phone calls through your computer. I used it for every call for about two weeks, utterly convinced that this would revolutionise my phone usage and phone bills. Only a Luddite, it seemed, could dump the cost-effective simplicity of the Skype headphones for the wallet-grabbing earache of the traditional handset.

So why are those headphones now crumpled and half-hidden behind the computer screen, where they remain untouched except to be mopped under whenever another cup of tea is spilt across the desk? It leaves me wondering where such a person fits into current theories on the diffusion of innovations.

According to current thinking, there are five categories of consumer out there: innovators (who bravely grab new ideas); early adopters (opinion leaders); the early majority (who listen to the opinion leaders); the late majority (sceptics eventually won over); and laggards (old dogs).

But what about those who seize on new ideas, who really go for them in a big way, but only for a short time? Let's call them (twisting the language of this scale) the Early Opt-Outers.

Keen? Yes. Bothered? No. The Early Opt-outer will eagerly grab hold of an innovation. Some they'll keep using, some they won't. They are not Luddites, because they will truly admire a new technology.

They will have a go. They will spread the word. But the Early Opt-Outer will not have the patience or inclination to keep using it. Or will simply see the flaws in the innovation - too awkward to use, too time consuming, maybe a bit pointless.

Yet they'll continue to expound on its potential wonders even after they have grown bored of the awkward reality.

The fossilised remains of Early Opt-Outer can be found on long abandoned blogs, in which carefully-crafted debut entries contain excited promises of logs to come, and nothing further.

They can be seen in the number of people registered with Second Life whose brief on-line existence is forever frozen somewhere at the bottom of the virtual hill where they encountered their boredom threshold.

There is a certain commitment required to be an Early Opt-Outer. Not just in adopting innovations just as quickly as you are dropping others, but in recognising that in a world of constant innovation you can't jump on every passing bandwagon. It means acknowledging that, whatever about keeping up with this world, there may be a whole other computer-generated alternative universe they'll only have a passing understanding of.

It is like stepping off the a boat into a new world, admiring the vast, uncharted, rich plains stretched out ahead - and deciding that you'll just stay on the beach.

But be sure to write and tell me how things are on the frontier. Because I do want to know. And I might even join you again one of these days.

Second Life: a virtual obsession that can last for life, or just for seconds