Class Discussion Thursday 9/5

Reference: CNN CNN article By Linnie Rawlinson

Summary: The article discusses the growing of the virtual world called Second Life. In this program users make avatars, or virtual representations of themselves, to traverse the virtual world. It mimics real life in the way that you get money and spend it on items in the program. She goes on to say how there is some concern that people who start using the program frequently will start to not care about their real life and only care about the program. She brings up the point that, why would people want to worry about their mortgages and payments when they could just log on to a world that is virtually care free.

Reaction: I personally like the idea of all this. Because it, like Facebook, would be a way to interact with people that you would never meet in your entire life. Corporations could also take advantage of this by using it to hold meetings across countries or even advertise to people in areas they couldn't normally reach. Things would be able to be tested in the virtual world using the same rules that we experience in the real world, or see how people react to it before it actually goes into production. In essence a virtual world like this is an advertiser's heaven. You could meet virtual face to virtual face people that only could only correspond via e-mail before. The net would become more intimate rather than it having so much anonymity. You wouldn't feel like you're communicating with just a computer screen, it'd be an actual person. I personally think that is a good thing.