What radio might gain from living a Second Life

As I posted about a while back, Boston’s WGBH-FM will stage a live performance by pianist Jeremy Denk today in the virtual world of Second Life (11 a.m. Eastern time, 8 a.m. “Second Life time,” as it’s called). As Denk performs in WGBH’s real-life performance studio in Boston, an avatar of Denk will play in a studio on WGBH’s Second Life island, Brightonia. After his performance, Denk will answer questions from the Second Life audience.

It’s the first time a radio station has ever orchestrated a Second Life simulcast of this kind — at least as far as Gary Mott knows. Mott, a radio producer at WGBH, has been overseeing the station’s Second Life buildout in recent months, creating the Brightonia space and its performance studio, which is based on WGBH’s actual Fraser Performance Studio.

When I spoke with Mott last week, I asked him why WGBH wanted to be in Second Life. His answer surprised me. “I’m not sure we should be, to be honest with you,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

WGBH applied for and received a $12,000 Public Media Innovation Grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the project. A colleague of Mott’s wrote the proposal, then left the station, and Mott took over. He says that Second Life has “lots of potential” but that it’s a very different world from the radio sphere he and his colleagues at WGBH are accustomed to. WGBH broadcasts to hundreds of thousands of listeners each week, while in Second Life the potential audience for Denk’s performance is much smaller, with only 50,000 or so avatars online at any given moment, and probably just a small fraction of those likely to attend today.

“We’re not talking about thousands of people here,” Mott said. “We’re talking about entering a wholly new space, with wholly new rules that apply.”

The audience may be small, but importantly, it might be brand new and totally unfamiliar with WGBH. Mott says some people enter Second Life to escape from the real world, which explains the popularity of its bars, casinos and dance clubs. But others go there to congregate and learn. While tooling around the virtual realm, Mott encountered the head of an in-world group of Second Lifers, the Classical Music Aficionados. Meeting him (or her — Mott doesn’t actually know) showed Mott that many Second Lifers may “have an appetite for public media content.”

To engage this audience in a significant way, Mott believes that media organizations in Second Life must provide a regular slate of events and happenings. Reuters and NBC Universal, among other media outlets, are in Second Life, Mott says, but don’t do much with their spaces.

It’s unclear whether WGBH will surpass those outlets and continue to experiment with Second Life after today’s performance. The broadcaster budgeted only a little extra for this effort on top of the CPB grant, and its experience with Jeremy Denk’s concert will help Mott and his colleagues determine whether future investment is warranted. Mott isn’t sure, but he’s enthusiastic. He envisions one potential use for Second Life: The World, the weekday public radio news show co-produced by WGBH, could give listeners a virtual space to congregate and discuss current events covered on the program. The show has an extensive website, “but there’s no way for these people to connect and discuss,” he says. “Second Life might be a place to do that.” (NPR’s Science Friday installment of Talk of the Nation has a Second Life home, and public radio’s The Infinite Mind was an early experimenter in the virtual world among media organizations.)

Whatever happens, today’s concert is likely to teach Mott and WGBH some valuable lessons, which the station will then share with other public broadcasters across the country. “We don’t pretend to know at this point exactly what’s going to happen,” Mott says, “because I’m sure we’ll discover some surprising things.”

We hope to as well — if all goes according to plan, Marty will attend the Jeremy Denk performance in Second Life and report back to you with her impressions. I can’t wait to see what she has to say. And if you attend, by all means, tell us how it goes!

Earlier post: WGBH stages virtual concert in Second Life