Social Control through Numbers

When I logged in last night, there was a Survey Question on the screen. (A first for me, but I gather, not uncommon.) It concerned the privacy of an avatar's number for....I should have written this down!....well, terms denoting resource-usage by that avatar. I believe this refers to some combination of Inventory size and attachments worn.

I had some things I wanted to do and so didn't take the time to explore this, but, presumably, this number is always available somewhere. I'd assumed that one of the drop-down menus offers it.

I guess the survey question was gauging reaction to having this number be in every avatar's Profile, so that when you right-click on someone and look at their Profile, you'd know if they were a 'resource hog' or not.

My first reaction was of revulsion. Though clearly some types of social control through peer-pressure are useful (a world in which people were unashamed to, say, openly torture animals, would not be a good world)----the whole concept has some very icky aspects.

Of course it's cheaper for Linden Lab to have users police themselves--and others--on their resource usage, than to provide the hardware and the level of service that would mean Hoochie Hair made no difference in performance. Possibly, LL people dream of a Second Life experience in which users routinely checked each others' Numbers and wrote songs and ballads praising those with Low Numbers and formed a culture based around Inventories with no more than 50 objects and going barefoot (those shoes can really cause lag!)

But that may be unrealistic. Many might have the same type of cynical reaction that I did, and even if the Number were to be made public, might form a culture based around not looking at that number.

On the other hand, as long as LL offers the Second Life experience to users for no fee, they do have a right to restrict what avatars can wear and carry around with them.

So in spite of my libertarian reaction, my final vote was based on the knowledge that this IS a business and that we ARE being offered quite a lot for free.

And I voted for Big Brother.

I'd hoped to read some opinion about this; rather foolishly, I suppose, I looked all through the SL Forums. Either people are disinclined to talk openly about such issues, or the Survey question was NOT sent to everyone, yesterday. (Though logically, if you want results of a Survey, you DO send it to your entire sample at as close to the same time as possible....)

I also Advance Searched the Internet in general, but haven't yet found anything about it. Well, I do need to remember the exact terms used; I hope to come across them in my general reading about SL.