I am reading Zippora's SL is not TV and wondering how comes that virtual environments, like second life have so high productivity level. Most of us are doing our virtual activities in the evening or during the night, in the periods of the day while we are already tired and need rest.
Physically we are probably relaxing indeed, but our thoughts go on and on and we won't give them a break. We don't give our grey cells a chance to start slumbering as long as we are chatting or building, even if they'd like to. We ARE tired but tend to ignore the symptoms – do your eyes ever itch after logging off? – or even laugh about it: haha typonese!
Still, forgetting the tiredness, we are reaching the peak of productivity then.
Let's not full ourselves. Many things we do in second life require exercise of skills, concentration, imagination and memory. You know, fresh and working brain. And we get all those out of nothing, when it's supposed that we're dead tired and uncapable of serious mental activity.
What makes us so concentrated while we are inside the virtual world? Why writing a LSL script in-world is so harder to interrupt than writing PHP off-line? I doubt that has anything to do with LSL and PHP. It's something about the environment. What is the magic that keep us going for another meeting in-world while we are hardly capable of another phone-call?
One of the first answers would be that virtual world is so much more interesting that meatspace. And that in second life we are doing the things we always dreamt of. Those two are highly inspirational so helping us to forget about the fatigue. While it would be silly to neglect the influence of those two, there might be something more. After all, not all the things we do in second life are our dreams, nor even interesting.
Are we projecting our tiredness to the avatar which can't be tired, so the feeling gets lost in the dead end until the brain burns itself? Is it the colorful environment of the perfect sunny world that keeps us going for one more, long after we should have been in the state of rest? Is it just the flickering of the screen that jamms our brain-waves and keep us active on some kind of electro-drug?
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