Appendix A Social Networks in Second Life

I use friendships to define trust and collaboration in Second Life. A friendship is created when one resident asks another to be a friend, and the other accepts. During the observation period, the inquiry could be made by right-clicking on the potential friend's avatar or instant messaging the avatar. Thirty-one percent of the study population had one or more friends. These data have some immediate virtues. They are available at low cost on a large, heterogeneous population. They are less subject than traditional network survey data to the vagaries of respondent recall and opinion differences on what constitutes a friendship (Fischer, 1982; Brewer and Webster, 1999; Feld and Carter, 2002; not free from the vagaries, Lewis et al., 2008, but less subject to them). In this case, friendship is clear — it is a consensual right-clicking. That is a damningly vapid image of inworld friendship, “consensual right-clicking,” but there is deeper substantive meaning available. When you and I agree to be friends, we each have to decide what privileges to grant one another. The choice is between four categories, given in Table A1 with abbreviated labels for easy reference. Rows distinguish the privileges a person gave to her friend. Columns distinguish privileges reciprocated by the friend. Numerous observations off the diagonal show that friendships often involved one friend having stronger privileges than the other.