The Use of the Second Life Virtual Environment and Other Social Media Essay

The Use of the Second Life Virtual Environment and Other Social Media for Teamwork - Essay Example This research will begin with the statement that the continuous development of technology worldwide has led businesses to invest a significant amount of money in order to keep their IT to a high standard. Moreover, it seems that technology has become a necessary tool for developing a wide range of organizational activities, particularly in regard to the communication of each business with its customers. The potentials of the Second Life as a tool for the development of team meetings and activities are examined and analyzed in this paper. A comparison is also made with other forms of social media used by organizations in various industries. The risks and challenges of social media as tools for organizing team meetings and activities are mostly related to the failures in the management of the relevant IT systems, i.e. this is an issue of faults in the organizational structure and control. The use of IT systems for organizing business activities has been a common practice in markets wor ldwide. In order to understand the role of Second Life virtual environment for specific business tasks, including the development of team meetings and activities, it would be necessary to describe the context of such environment. In accordance with Lehmann-Grube, the virtual environment (known also as the virtual world) is ‘asynchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers’. The Second Life is a virtual world incorporating most of the facilities available in real worlds, such as ‘businesses, recreation, buildings, and services’. The Second Life virtual environment has become particularly popular among businesses, especially regarding its potentials to offer a cost-effective and well-organized platform for training and team working.