Living Life through Second Life...

Imagine meeting people online via an immersive virtual environment for work, play, or romance. This happens every day. Second Life is the most influential of virtual worlds in our current technology landscape. 

PBS Frontline did a great documentary called Digital Nation (click here for the video link). They spent time on virtual reality in different circumstances including its application in the health and wellness for soldiers who struggle with PTSD, Internet addiction and video games. The documentary also spend a significant amount of time reporting on Second Life, the most famous of the all the internet virtual worlds. All of these links are worth viewing and I am sure there are many more articles, videos, and websites that can explore Second Life and its technology as well as philosophical implications.

Second Life is a disruptive technology. It provides an avenue for people to communicate, live a digital life with less restrictions or inhibitions, work from home, build personal and romantic relationships. It can be a considered an immersive social network that can be used for business but is in many ways more of a personal expression. I think that Second Life is already in decline and will be replaced by other new communication and/or social networking tools that will incorporate but not only be limited to virtual worlds. I think that Second Life has limitations in K-12 settings due to privacy issues, restrictions and the inability to manage Second Life from a teacher's point of view. It may have limited use as a teacher-centered technology tool. One recent study about Second Life in K-12 and Higher Education can be accessed here. I think Second Life will be gone in 3-5 years facing a similar fate as MySpace, which is currently in steep decline.

Storytelling goes Digital and the Future of the Web...

Dr. Thornburg’s idea of the rhymes of history basically states that many modern technological innovations echo previous ideas, experiences, and/or cultural interactions from humanity’s past. Digital storytelling through voicethread.com, storybird.com, or iPad apps such as StoryLines all attempt to captivate the visual, auditory, and textual elements of storytelling. The format for exchanging stories has changed throughout the years; however the purpose of the stories remains as a collective approach to share the human experience. Digital storytelling attempts to engage as many senses as possible as a way to recreate in a sense the storytelling around a fire among family, friends, and/or communities.

Kevin Kelly’s extrapolation of where the web is going in his TED Talk “The next 5,000 days of the web” here describes what it is evolving into a single, global machine and the web is its OS (operating system). All of us together make up this machine and the web, which has artificial intelligence but it is in and of itself not a singular consciousness or entity, rather it is made up of all of the people and things that are connected to it. He also contends that we will become codependent on this Web as we are currently dependent on the alphabet and writing. Instead of an alternate reality, this emerging web combines physical reality with digital reality. Kelly reverses McLuhan’s statement “Machines are the extensions of the human senses” to “humans are now going to be the extended senses of the machine”. These ideas reinforce the connections, consciousness, and collective consciousness of humanity and its perception of how it sees itself as a collective, interactive, and dominant force in the natural world. 

References:

Kelly, K. (2007, December). Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the Web [Speech]. Speech delivered at the EG 2007 Conference, Los Angeles. Retrieved fromhttp://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html

Laureate Education (2010) Rhymes of History. Thornburg, D., Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=6200933&Survey=1&47=6076761&ClientNodeID=984645&coursenav=1&bhcp=1