Virtual worlds like Habbo, Toontown Online, Club Penguin, Poptropica, Runescape, and even topic specific message boards can take somebody out of their surrounding to be immersed into this alternative reality that hosts many different uses. There is a necessity of fun and most of these virtual worlds being games brings on that factor. Not to mention if its multiplayer or multidimensional world, there is communication between players to work for or against each other to accomplish their goals in this alternative reality. Not to mention, it can be used for informative and leisurely reasons like PurseForum, a forum where women discusss their health, reveal their bag obsessions, up to the minute news, and other sections that reveal/ evaluate what they are doing in their lives, their opinions about things, and slowly this helps to reveal who another person is behind their computer/tablet screen. With message boards can be evolved to include things like private wiki databases that only a sole companies' employees can have access to and share ideas on topic and also off topic if they wish, from a business standpoint.
The positives to this is children, young adults and adults will have this sort of access from any remote location they are in the world to communicate with other people from all walks of life. Keeping on communication, the message board can help people from different countries communicate what is going on in their lives or share their opinions on world affairs. Not to mention, people that work for a global company can for example, talk to a fellow colleague in Botswana while they are in Ukraine. It brings about this closeness. For children's communicative skills, it can help them seek out talking to other people and get less shy about opening up about what they are thinking about if they cant talk to their parents about it, it is sort of bridging together their way of becoming more confident and open, so they can utilize these skills off the internet or virtual reality. Also another positive is the fostering of creativity, in terms of people being able to take up the persona they want to be, create custom characters that they identify as themselves on these virtual reality games. Not to mention, in a business standpoint, creativity with problem solving and fostering brainpower and sharing amongst each other over a net server would create a great work atmosphere especially tech companies and old business models assimilating some of this new accessible culture into its operations. This could build employee confidence and self-esteem in sharing their ideas and brainstorming with other fellow colleagues in implementing these ideas.
The cons are quite simple, you can be talking to someone but at the same time, you cannot tell if they are being genuine or presenting themselves truthfully because there is this idea that some people "catfish", or misrepresent who they are or what they do, even lying about their age or certain aspects of their lives to seem more attractive to someone else. This gives a sort of falsifiable credibility to people being honest online.There is also the actions of others online that consist of attacking or bullying others, not only does it happen on these virtual worlds all too often where others are criticized for their beliefs or made fun of because of it, but it seems to extend to professional school settings where there are college gossip sites that posts inappropriate or embarrassing items about people that go to a certain university. There are sites like "JuicyCampus, that encouraged students to talk trash about their peers in an anonymous forum" (Young, 2009). There is also issues of privacy in terms of over sharing that could be related to anonymous posting, like there could be information about somebody that a person gossiping about it can share to thousands of other people, thus breaking one's privacy and being in possession of such private and vital information that can hurt and destroy someone else.
When it comes to technology there is always pros and cons but to discuss the future of virtual realities under this umbrella of technology, there will definitely be a more personable and innovative approach when creating new sites and updating previous ones. For a more personal experience, I believe there will be sections where people can enter certain groups on these realities that have similar interests and interact more. And a more innovative approach would be the accessibility to virtual realities off the internet, a blend of old and new media technology in a sense. Creating more of an atmosphere where artificiality gets less and less.
Works Cited:
- Young, J. (2009, August 31). They're Back, and They're Bad: Campus-Gossip Web Sites. Retrieved November 15, 2014, from http://chronicle.com/article/Theyre-BackTheyre-B/48220/
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