Internet Field Trip

Today, socialising on the internet has become bigger than ever. With such networks as MySpace, Facebook, IM and msn, people are becoming somewhat less interacted in the real world. What is the real world though? A slow change is drawing clear and maybe what we know as the real world is in fact the virtual real world.

The differences with the virtual worlds and IM’s etc are the amount of interaction that you can have with the other recipients. Virtual worlds let you do pretty much anything except for being, most importantly, real – that is humanly real. You are interjected into the virtual world where you can walk around fly and do many more things. A character designed by yourself is shown, whether it reflects you yourself or someone fiction, and means that you are now ‘internally connected’ or ‘wired.’ IM’s such as msn messenger let you do voice, word, and video chat but this is only the tip of the ice berg when it comes to new age communication. Because the virtual worlds are 3D it makes you feel like you are there yourself. It’s like playing a video game in a sense – you are now the real player, you have a face, a body and a personality in a sense, not just another face on a page. You are an interactive character that can involve yourself more than ever. You can create businesses, houses, anything you want, even make money off it. The sky is the limit literally – you can fly.

However, much controversy is seen in that it is more open to attack than IM because it’s more personal. Some people actually design their characters on themselves and this suggests that maybe an attack could be made on that person in real life, if not in the virtual world, because everyone knows what they look like. Virtual worlds are a developing technology and is just the beginning in new age communication.