Beam me down, Klausi!
Column Every year at the end of January, Davos mutates into an alpine spaceship. This year, WEF founder Klaus Schwab expanded his virtual realm into the second life of the Internet. A revealing expansion.
Column Every year at the end of January, Davos mutates into an alpine spaceship. This year, WEF founder Klaus Schwab expanded his virtual realm into the second life of the Internet. A revealing expansion. Everyone wants a second chance. Or better still, another self that is available at all times. And preferably immediately and again and again. This desire is as old as humanity itself and connects us across all borders and cultures. Stories and characters with the potential for identification are the materials for satisfying this basic need, as literature has provided for thousands of years. For almost 100 years, film has provided another, almost inexhaustible source. And now the Internet, which is by definition infinite, is getting straight to the point, unlike books or movies. And this is - like almost everything in the dotcom realm - essentially of a commercial (and not artistic) nature. Even the pretty name of the three-dimensional online parallel world "Second Life" (SL) does not hide this fact. Even on the homepage, directly under the logo, there are basic functions such as "Buy Linden Dollars" (the currency of the second life), "Own Virtual Land" or "View LindeX" (a kind of internal stock market index), which immediately let the business spirit out of the bottle. Even the self-advertising suggesting emancipation and participation "Your World. Your Imagination" does not change anything. On the contrary: the guys from Linden Lab in California will soon follow in the footsteps of their predecessors from Myspace and YouTube and have their platform gilded by a media multinational.
The mother of all internet self-discovery worlds has long since mutated from a game to a marketplace. "US dollars spent last 24h: $ 1,215,748" reported the homepage proudly on February 21. No wonder, after the sex and gambling industry, more serious service providers are now also opening SL branches en masse. The week before last, the first Swiss advertising agency even advertised an SL branch. Mathias Döpfner also recently admitted in the Handelsblatt that SL is "not just a free pastime, but big business". And the CEO of Axel Springer AG should know, after all he publishes the first purely virtual newspaper with Avastar - in SL for SL. By his own admission, however, the online avant-gardist Döpfner "doesn't have the time" for his own avatar.
Not so Klaus Schwab. Although hardly underemployed as founder and organizer of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the self-proclaimed do-gooder took his second chance to (pseudo-)open up the exclusive economic club at the 2007 Davos Annual Meeting: SL residents were able to ask him questions via Adam Reuters, SL correspondent for the news agency of the same name, which were answered by a Schwab avatar.
This PR campaign was sold full-bodied as a programmatic "extension of the Davos Conversation" - also by compliant media partners. However, like the so-called Open Forum launched in 2003 under pressure from critics, it also had a mere fig leaf function. This time, the trendy means of Web 2.0 were intended to distract from the core business of the WEF.
And today, as in the past, that means "Connecting and Enabling Big Business" (Financial Times). So there is still a common denominator between the online parallel world and the Davos spaceship. However, this is neither transparency nor participation, but quite simply fraudulent labeling.
> Oliver Classen is press spokesman for the development policy organization Berne Declaration.
The mother of all internet self-discovery worlds has long since mutated from a game to a marketplace. "US dollars spent last 24h: $ 1,215,748" reported the homepage proudly on February 21. No wonder, after the sex and gambling industry, more serious service providers are now also opening SL branches en masse. The week before last, the first Swiss advertising agency even advertised an SL branch. Mathias Döpfner also recently admitted in the Handelsblatt that SL is "not just a free pastime, but big business". And the CEO of Axel Springer AG should know, after all he publishes the first purely virtual newspaper with Avastar - in SL for SL. By his own admission, however, the online avant-gardist Döpfner "doesn't have the time" for his own avatar.
Not so Klaus Schwab. Although hardly underemployed as founder and organizer of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the self-proclaimed do-gooder took his second chance to (pseudo-)open up the exclusive economic club at the 2007 Davos Annual Meeting: SL residents were able to ask him questions via Adam Reuters, SL correspondent for the news agency of the same name, which were answered by a Schwab avatar.
This PR campaign was sold full-bodied as a programmatic "extension of the Davos Conversation" - also by compliant media partners. However, like the so-called Open Forum launched in 2003 under pressure from critics, it also had a mere fig leaf function. This time, the trendy means of Web 2.0 were intended to distract from the core business of the WEF.
And today, as in the past, that means "Connecting and Enabling Big Business" (Financial Times). So there is still a common denominator between the online parallel world and the Davos spaceship. However, this is neither transparency nor participation, but quite simply fraudulent labeling.
> Oliver Classen is press spokesman for the development policy organization Berne Declaration.
