In my ‘Casulties of the Web 2.0 Revolution‘ entry I bemoaned the death of the concept of Cyberspace. Today Sardionerak wrote an interesting entry on Second Life. While I’ve been aware of Second Life for a while, I had never considered it in the context of trying to revive the old Cyberspace / Virtual Reality dream. (I’m not even going to comment on its potential as a marketing tool–it just isn’t going to be for WWC.) However, it’s really heartening to see that at least such a thing is out there. I hope it can develop, mature, and not become too commercialized (ha ha). I see from the site that they’ve opened the source code for the client software. Being a believer in open source, that only makes me like it more.

And I’m scared to death to try it out. Second Life addiction is not something I need right now.

Then again, maybe it’s not so promising. Of course, the old ‘vaporware’ virtual reality dreams and vague musings about Cyberspace in the ’90s weren’t really all that great either–not once I get past my own nostalgic rose glasses anyway.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 12:23 am and is filed under Electronic Culture. It has been viewed 915 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!