Avatar: A digital representation of one's self
With the internet comes great power and with great power comes with great responsibilities. Having the ability to create whatever you want with the help of the internet and help sites like the simple facebook and neopets to the truely escapist Second Life, it's hard to know what can be considered real and cyber. How can we say that the love we have for a neopet isn't real? How can we say that marrying someone on second life isn't the start of a new romance?
[Meadows (2008:58)] “People in virtual worlds build things, use them, sell them, trade them and discuss them. When another person confirms what I am seeing, places value on it, spends time working to pay for it, buys it, keeps it, uses it, talks about it, gets emotional about it, and then sells it – this tells me there is something real happening. The suspension of disbelief has become a grounding of belief”
This is Media and there of.
Second Life, created by Linden Labs is an online world where people can live basically an ideal life. Think the sims but without the restrictions and the sim language. A growing enterprise, the average Second Life user is in their mid 30s-40s which would explain why I've never really heard of this internet craze before. The appeal of this site is that people can logon and create an avatar, a representation of one's self. It doesn't necessarily have to be an exact replica, because in Second Life you can be whoever you want to be and do whatever you like. And when I mean whatever I mean whatever. Sex, conceiving children, flying, plastic surgery it's all there ready for you at a click of a button. This fad undertaken by thousands of adults leads people to exchange their own money for 'Linden Dollars' to be used to purchase things like land, clothing and even dare I say the ideal penis.
At this point where I stand to judge the reality of the situation. Are people really getting something out of this site that is real? Are the feelings created real? Can they be really justified by what they do online?
Personally I've never really been a fan of games where you control the life of someone again like the Sims. I find it boring and it makes me feel that I'm neglecting my own life while maintaining the ones in the little computer screen. I've never had a connection of a character created nor had a relationship with another character.
Putting myself in another person's shoes I can understand why some people use these sites. As said before the average people who use Second life are in their older stages in life. And being general they would be people who haven't necessarily achieved what they wanted in life. So I see Second Life for them as exactly that, a way for them to be what they wanted to be and more without doing it in their own reality.
However all of these things done while in Second Life or any platform with a virtual reality isn't real. I don't think that if you get married online that you are or that if you buy something online that you own it in some way. I think it's a way of making the world more complicated. When we dream, at times some of our greatest dreams can come true. You can be with the love of your life or do the unthinkable. Does that make it real because you did it in another world? No, once again it's something that was done in another world besides reality. Sure we develop feelings when playing these games but as humans be tend to develop connects and feelings with anything like dreams. The feelings are real but the creator of those feelings is fake. I could sit here and think of a nice burger and even go to the lengths of going on to Neopets and purchasing one, that might make me feel better or closer to that burger, but it's not real.
We are blurring the lines with what is real in reality and what is fake. Some can argue because the online world is created that means that the things created are somewhat real, however the fact that they are 'somewhat' real make them incomplete and thus not real in my books
