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Mark Warner, former Democratic governor of Virginia and likely “fallback” candidate for president should Hillary Clinton not run in 2008, will visit the virtual world of Second Life today for a chat with New World Notes’s Wagner James Au, at 12:30 SLT (3:30pm EST), in an event produced by Reuben Steiger’s Millions of Us (a sponsor of James’s blog). The idea for the visit seems to have come from within Warner’s Forward Together political action committee itself, according to an interesting interview Au has with Nancy Scola (SL resident Nancy Mandelbrot), whose job at Forward Together consists in part of trying “to connect with the technology/geek community.” While there have been local political candidates in SL before, this certainly marks the highest profile politico to visit this (or probably any other) virtual world. It also raises interesting questions of what’s public and what’s private in a place that (on the surface) is primarily governed by a Terms of Service rather than by a Constitution. [And see update below.]

3pointD is well aware that the Constitution takes precedence, of course, but that’s not always how it looks in online worlds. In any case, the question arises because a Second Life Herald correspondent reported to me late last night that Warner would be headed into Second Life today. Not having much more information than that (and being in the middle of recording an episode of SecondCast), I failed to blog the rumor — a mistake, in retrospect. The point is, some would say that the presence of Warner in Second Life was protected by the Terms of Service, which asks residents not to reveal the details of each other’s offline lives. But Warner is a public figure of national prominence; legal precedence stretching back many decades exempts public figures from some of the protections that are extended to those of us who fly below the radar. By almost any measure, his visit to SL would have been fair game for a blog post last night. This is my small mea culpa for not reporting it earlier (and really I’m just sore that I didn’t scoop James when I could have), but it should also serve to flag an interesting moment in the history of virtual worlds: Second Life is now being seen as a place to gain political traction with those out on the leading edge of technology. (Forward Together has an admirable track record of promoting Warner in high-tech circles.) This is partly down to the platform’s being so much in the press these days; the real benefit of a visit to Second Life is that it could well gain you some newspaper column inches, as this one no doubt will. But this is also the kind of thing that starts to produce a virtuous circle of adoption: the more prominent figures that dip into Second Life, the more everyday users will come to adopt the technology, making it yet more attractive to companies, stars and pols, which will attract more people, and so on. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run rubber-stamped the Internet and World Wide Web as an invaluable vehicle for a political campaign. Could Mark Warner do the same for virtual worlds?

[UPDATE: Tony Walsh makes an interesting point about whether Warner’s treatment by Linden Lab has been entirely impartial. LL apparently created a custom last name for Warner rather than having him enter the world like any other resident. That may sound like small beer, but it’s akin to having ICANN, which manages Internet addresses, give advantageous treatment to a candidate setting up a Web page. It doesn’t set a very good precedent, and one hopes LL will at least consider such analogues in future. There are laws governing equal access to mainstream media for political parties and candidates; it seems only a matter of time before such laws begin to reach into the metaverse.]