Swimming with mermaids: Communication and social density in the Second Life merfolk community

While individuals are solicited by a growing number of online networks and virtual communities, human cognitive resources are still limited in terms of the number of fruitful interactions a given individual can sustain. With a high degree of competition for attention, affiliation with the community and communication between its members are central for the survival of virtual communities. A particular virtual community could shed a new light on these phenomena. Indeed, beside the conventional communities based on human-like land-dwelling avatars, a merfolk community spontaneously emerged in the seas of the virtual world of Second Life. The fact that merfolk avatars characteristics strongly restrain their interactions with others and their ability to simultaneously join other communities obviously impacts the structuring and communication within the merfolk community. In order not to become isolated, the members have to develop optimal strategies to keep strong bonds, which in turn reinforce the immersion process. The Second Life merfolk community therefore provides an ideal model to study how members of a virtual community can compensate for ultra-specialization by increasing the quality of the internal communication processes within the community. Furthermore, the observation of the merfolk virtual community demonstrates how optimizing communication, even in a community with a wide repartition and low actual density within the virtual world, can reinforce social density.