Yesterday I attended the Congressional "event" in Second Life that featured Representative George Miller of California and was supposed to feature some sort of appearance by Nancy Pelosi, all meant to coincide with the swearing in of the 110th session of Congress. I had written about the announcement and noted that "political geeks like me have been getting more and more excited about activism in the virtual space." Some of that excitement remains, but the frustrations involved with simply trying to participate did their best to make it wither.

The event was set to being at noon, and I arrived ten minutes early to account for any technical difficulties. I was greeted with a cool virtual rendering of the Capitol building, which in Second Life is semi-transparent.

As Aldon Hynes and others commented, if only the real Congress could be as transparent!

People were milling about when I got there, so I (or my avatar) sat down and waited for the event to begin. A lot of interesting people were there, from John Gage of Sun Microsystems to Adam Reuters, the Reuters journalist whose beat is Second Life, to several journalists and bloggers who specialize in covering Second Life. However, it all seemed a little chaotic and it was hard to discern the purpose of the event.

One of the bigger issues with Second Life is the amount of bandwidth and processing power needed to simply be there. Most of my applications on my Mac are rendered useless as I sit and wait for my avatar's clothes to load, and navigating around a space can be frustratingly herky-jerky, as the your processor and Internet connection seem to be playing tug-of-war. The result is that when turning a corner, or walking up to a wall, I often walk too fast and run through the wall and find myself outside of the island, standing in what looks like quicksand...

People were milling about at the event and having meta-converesations about it -- who is coming, how to find out information, the sheer importance of it all -- when suddenly I realized I'd been sitting at a bench for a while and not seeing anyone speak (when people talk in Second Life, their words appear at the bottom left of the the screen; you can also IM someone for a private conversation). I IM'd the woman sitting next to me to see what what was going on. No response.

After a minute I realized I'd been disconnected.

I had to commence the lengthy process of quitting out of Second Life and starting it up again. Once I was back, I had to wait for everything to load up again -- the Capitol building, the screens that would be showing live C-SPAN coverage of the swearing in, my clothes, etc.

By this point I had to go. At 3pm I received an email from the organizers with the agenda of the events for that day, events that had already occurred. Weird.

In the end, George Miller did show up, which you can read about here. He talked about Second Life a bit (a lot of conversation in Second Life are curiously about Second Life) and the Dem's upcoming agenda, including their first 100 hours. Pelosi didn't show up or call in, but I doubt anyone truly thought she'd have the time to do so.

Nevertheless, some viewers of the Colbert Report have produced a funny skit using Second Life-like graphics featuring a typically fearless Stephen Colbert fighting a squadron of Nancy Pelosi clones while a gold bikini-clad Soledad O'Brien gives a play-by-play aboard Karl Rove's sail-barge... just watch it.

The Virtual Capitol is now open to the public; check it out if you can.

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Tags: capitol hill, congress, pelosi, reuters, second life

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