Thursday, March 4, 2010

Thoughts on Second life

I believe that certain areas of Second life have gotten out of hand and are weighing in on how we interact as individuals face to face. The Second life lifestyle has given people the opportunity to live out their fantasies and establish a personality that they do not possess on a daily face to face basis. At first, this idea seems entirely harmless, possessing an alter ego and expressing it online to the people you most likely will never meet, seems like it may be playful with no long term consequences. However, every guilty pleasure could be taken to the limit, and so has this idea of a second life.
In the cyber world we are given opportunities to interact, to be journalists, to be sellers and buyers, but at what cost? When individuals are restricted, they may find ways to rebel against that restriction, or they may not. However, when the access to the world is readily available without any restrictions, it is difficult to hold yourself back. Prostitution has found a way to no longer consist of girls on the street, but can be conducted via internet without the fear of being prosecuted by the law. The second life that people live over the internet has created crimes that were not possible to commit before the internet age. I suppose we put ourselves in certain virtual world situations voluntarily, however it becomes more dangerous each year and we should protect ourselves from being trapped in this cyber world. I believe this changes the way people act in person entirely. The internet is no longer only on our computers, it is also on our phones making it impossible to escape. The world is only a click away and we are a very easily influenced society. Whether we are at home, in the car, at a restaurant, it is all irrelevant; we can access the web at any time and any place.
People have become anti-social to a certain degree due to the fact that everything is conducted through email, since it is now easier and a more efficient way to contact a person via email rather than giving them a phone call. By the time these individuals get home, they are more likely to text their friends rather than actually call them. Therefore the people who have an entirely different personality over the internet when conducting business or sexual relations, it most definitely will eventually interfere with their personal lives. Some may spend even more time on the internet simply because they are more comfortable with their internet personality rather than their actual one. This kind of behavior will inevitably cause a drift in their personal relationships outside of the internet, their communication skills will suffer, and there is no doubt that they will lose the people they love over a guilty internet pleasure. As seductive as the cyber world may seem, too much of something is damaging, and therefore it is best to avoid it rather than let yourself turn into a person that you no longer even recognize when you look in the mirror.

2 comments:

  1. I have not tried out Second Life yet, but it does allow for people to come together in a virtual space, and save the trouble, expense, and environmental cost of travel. I understand that IBM is using Second Life for meetings now.

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