Blog: Are you blurring the line between real life and online life?
Clarity on Fire
English - July 02, 2019 04:00 - 15 minutes - 15.2 MB - ★★★★★ - 150 ratingsSociety & Culture Health & Fitness Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Back in college I did a case study about something I thought was wild at the time …
It was called Second Life. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It was a virtual-reality online game that connected hundreds of thousands of users around the world. You built an entire life — complete with houses, jobs, pets, and spouses — inside this game.
I was fascinated by the intersection between real-life and virtual reality. I read stories about people on Second Life who played 8 or 9 hours a day — to the point that their “second life” felt more like real life than their actual life.
I read about people whose virtual reality persona married another person’s virtual reality persona … and the legal ramifications that ensued when the real-life spouses found out.
I also read about people spending real-life currency on completely virtual products, which was the major question underlying my project: Is there a real-life market for unreal products?
Turns out the answer was yes. Big companies like Coca-Cola were actually considering selling products on Second Life because people would buy themselves (their virtual selves, that is) virtual Cokes! It blew my mind.
Eight years later, my mind is not so easily blown.
To put it in perspective, this happened around the same time that a professor mentioned Twitter during a public relations class, and a classmate and I turned to each other and asked, “Do you know what that is?”
Facebook was a thing obviously, but hardly anyone had it on their phones yet. Instagram had yet to arise. And forget about Snapchat.
It was a simpler time when people’s actual lives and their technological lives were still somewhat separate.
Now I wonder … is there even a difference anymore between “life” and “what happens on the Internet?” Should there be? And where would you even begin to draw the line?
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