Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

In our class and from the readings we found out how entertaining, helpfull and interesting this new world of Virtual Life/Second Life is. But infact it is that second life mixes up with reality.

I defiantly do support this new world of communication, establishing friends on line, meeting people, staying in touch with your existing friend and family, getting over certain fears and so on.
Many companies know how to use this new technologies into their advantige and communicate with people through virtual world. Such as Gap creating a custum fitting room in the Virtual World so that the custumers can tryout new products, see exectly how it fits them and be able to immidialy purchase it over the web. This is a great benefit for Gap, because it allows comments from the custumers and it enchances sales over the internet. Alo different architeture firms can create and avatar to check out interaction of people in the project that they are designing. This is all great and I highly support it.
But the thing is that we only look at the positive side of this. I am sorry for ruining this illusion of ideal world in Virtual Life, but this is not real!! Yes, it is great to play with it, to enhance communication but if we were to look at the statistics-real statistic that show to how many people did this actually benefit it would probably be far less than what we are being introduce to.

People can easily get lost in this world, and loose perceptions in reality. Yes they might join in desire to loose free of social restrains and practice their interaction with people through this world, and it might help them. But imagine how many people get carried away, and just waste hours and hours trying to do so in this illusion, instead of going into the real world! Imagine how many frauds there might be, how much crime, maniacs and weird people is actually out there. This comes to be like a free lend for those freaks that are limited in the real world and are free to do what ever they like in their Second Life, don't you think this is bit dangerous?? Imagine naive teenagers, or just lonely people that are looking for any kind of attention..well imagine the trouble that they can get into.
I like the quote from the "I've been in that club, just not in real life" in which Clayton Patterson a photographer of Manhattan said: “It’s the complete denial of your space, a complete theft of what it was that you lived in for years.” referring to a virtually created world in one of the avatars, in Manhattan that holds neighborhood's trendy places.
I believe that real life, as dangerous and challenging as it is, should stay real and present, because it is hard enough to make our living in the real world and imagine what would it take to do a double job in Second Life and get carried away and loose perceptions of reality.

Social Networking

Social networking is a new key term for staying in touch and being connected with your friends as well as with the rest of the world.



What are some ways that these technologies can be used? There are many ways to this aspect if we look at the personal level to many it is a way to stay in touch up to date with the events in your life as well as to learn what are your close friends, relatives or co-workers up to( when I say this I preliminarily think of twitter) but other social websites such as match.com or blogger give us a chance to express ourselves. Like match.com where people are able to show their interests and need and that way be matched with a partner, on dates or just socially or maybe more in this case web based entertained. I heard that this works pretty well and that there is a big resource of different people that might be interested in just same thing as you are. Blogger allows us to post our thought, catalogs different reports get insights for a particular topic etc. and be able to share it with the rest of the world. Also I very much support the use of messengers which are also a way of social networking, where interviews and personal connections can be performed. This can defiantly be loocked at as a benefit because many companies do not have representatives in the city where they might find recruits so a benefit of for example Skype is that there can have an interview with live web cam and audio performance.

The dark side of this aspect is that people can get in trouble by not being careful with the concepts that they post on their blogs, facebook or twitter updates and other might abuse that.

In a way I am afraid where the technology is heading and how feast it is spreading and globalizing people-which is defiantly great-the world is getting smaller and the access to different information is much easier. But the part that scares me is the fact that people are replacing real physical society with the online virtual world. I think allot of time is being wasted on computers while that precious time can be spent out side in the nature, playing sports or just simple socialising among friends rather than on web.

Check Out Social Networking Sites

Social Networking sites are globally enlarging their functions. Everyday more and more people join these networks out curiosity or just with an intention to network and meet new people.
I, personally, am not in the big favor of these because I do not like to be exposed to everyone.

MySpace has this aspect of communicating where everyone and anyone can visit your page, view your pictures your favorite music, the things that you like and don't like. For me this is a invasion of privacy, if you of course decide to put yourself out there.
On the other hand another social networking site that I kind of approve is Facebook, because here you have a choice to whom are you going to let to see your pictures and your activities in life. But still even this is limited to a selected public where your privacy can be majorly expose even to those that are not your friends but are friends of the friends.
From my knowledge hi5 is another one similar to facebook but it is in general more popular among South American community.
Twitter is another form of social networking where you are updating your followers with events that you are going through daily. This is a newest version of a social network I believe and it is the one that is not exposing you graphically at most part but verbally, in a way that you update your status. For me this is not that interesting because I do not like to share my everyday tasks nor do I really want to know what are you doing or thinking every second of the day.
But this is a new era of communication and in some ways it is helpful and defiantly time consuming.