Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

What are different ways these virtual worlds can be used?

We define Virtual worlds as “a computer-based simulated environment populated by many users who can create a personal avatar, and simultaneously and independently explore the virtual world, participate in its activities and communicate with others”. Nowadays people, especially kids, are using those worlds and they spend at least a couple of hours of their days to live the experience of others worlds.

These virtual worlds can be used in different ways, the most popular is gaming because the public attracted are kids, and they look for new interactive ways of entertainment. As we can see in the article After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot? other ways to use virtual worlds are “You can use virtual worlds in education, in delivery services, or as an advanced form of telehealthcare that offers so much more than videoconferencing. Virtual worlds can give us social connectivity, built-in support groups, and ways to avoid ever being alone again.”

 

What are the pros and cons? 

As any technology the virtual world has pros and cons. First, talking about pros we can see that this new worlds offer to users Social connectivity, is not the same classic social connectivity of 10 years ago, now they can play, chat or hang from their comfortable space at their homes, this fact is an advantage for people with problems to communicate or social problems. In the article iReport: ‘Naughty Auties’ battle autism with virtual interaction we can see how people with Asperger’s syndrome feel that this worlds let them socialize without pressure, as the creator of this virtual world said “So you’re not going out into the real world meeting people, you’re going meeting people online and in your own home, so you’re perfectly relaxed. It’s just a fantastic tool to use to bring people together.”

The real problem starts when people cannot differentiate between real life and virtual life, and they spend too many hours in a world that does not exist, they are trying to avoid being alone but at the end of the day in the real life they are alone because they isolate themselves.

 

How do virtual worlds foster creativity?

Another positive factor for virtual worlds is the possibility of express creativity. In the virtual world there are no barriers of money, space, or self-esteem, it is a world where people can be anything they want and create what they want, they can build everything from scratch without any limit. For this reason creativity for users in virtual worlds it is infinite.

 

What do you think the future of virtual worlds will look like?

I believe that in the future virtual world will be mix with real world, like an augmented reality, because right now humans need to find new ways to express creativity, build new things, socialize, all that without missing real life.

BlackBoard vs Twitter discussion

Both tools are used to discuss a topic and/or start a debate about something; however both Twitter and BlackBoard have differences in the way how the users can operate.

As we know, both of them share some characteristics, you can transmit your opinion posting about a topic, beefing up it with images related to the topic or links of interested. They let people to share and read about other’s opinions therefore they create an online conversation or a debate.

One of the main differences between them is the amount of characters allowed to share in each post, in the case of Twitter a post cannot contain more than 140 characters, this issue forced the user to summarized their opinion, therefore the debate is more dynamic you lose less information and it seems more as a real conversation not an online conversation. In the case of BlackBoard there is also a limitation of characters but this is that wide that it does not even affects the user intent, for this reason here an user can explain better his/her opinion, giving details and examples for it.

Another factor to take in account is how the users can find and follow a specific debate or conversation, In the case of Twitter using a Hashtag (#) a user create an specific conversation, follow some topics or read about them. In the case of BlackBoard you can follow a conversation just if you are invited to it, or if you are part of a group that is involved.

Finally Twitter offers some more kind of management of those conversations. As a user you are able to share a post of another user that you like or just want to “retweet” it and a user can “like” a specific post of another user of him self’s. Also each post can be related to more than one conversation just by using the appropriate hashtag and also contain the name of a user with the aim that he is been notified about that post.

If we focused in an in-class discussion I believe that is better to use BlackBoard model because users can provide more information about their opinions and giving more details about it. Besides, in an in-class discussion users don’t need all the tools offered by twitter.

Social Networking Sites: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn

In order to compare the impact on society of each social network the first factor we need to compare is how many active users has each network. Facebook is in the top with 1700 million active users per month, then we find Instagram with 500 million active users per month, in third place Twitter with 400 million active users, and finally LinkedIn with 100 million active users per month. As we can see, Facebook’ active users duplicate the second social network active users, and therefore we can imagine how important Facebook is nowadays, and its impact to social and business communication.

The second factor to analyze is how a user can create a network in each of these Social networks. The behavior of Facebook and LinkedIn is similar and the same for Instagram and Twitter. In Facebook and LinkedIn if you want to add a person to your list of contacts, you need their approval, and once you have their approval both contacts are connected, for example, if I want to add Maria to my list of contacts and see what she is posting and know her activity I send her a “friend request” she has the opportunity to approve or rejected that request, in the case that Maria accepts the requested both can see each other profile information and activity. On another hand, Instagram and Twitter users use a different methodology to create a network; a user can follow another user and there is not “friend request” in this case it is just a user that want to know about the activity of another user, this means that the second user, the one that is been followed, does not necessarily follow the first one, for example if I want to follow Sam, I can do it and I will receive news about all his activity but he won’t receive any of my activity unless he decided to follow me back.

The last factor that I want to analyze is the kind of information that you can find in each social network. Starting with Facebook because it seems to be the most popular one nowadays. This social network is used to share personal experiences, users can share those experiences using images, videos, and written posts, in all of them you can specify the people with you (others Facebook users), the place, and how that makes you feel. On another hand, Instagram required a picture or a video in each post, in this case the picture or the video is the principal element of the post, and the written part is just a complement of the post. Twitter use another posting process, in twitter the principal component of the post is what you write and how you are able to summarize the message in 140 characters giving the option to answer other users post creating a kind of conversation, for this reason Twitter users frequently share opinions about different topics. As we know, LinkedIn is a “business” social network, in this case users are not sharing personal experiences or personal opinions they share articles, news and documents and comment them using a high written record.

Social networking

Social networking has changed the way people socialize for almost 10 years. Those new technologies open channels of socialization not only between people also between businesses and consumers.

Today it is very difficult to find a person who does not use a social network to share their experiences through the network, and people are also related through social networks, talk, share, comment on the moments and feelings of others, approve or disapprove these experiences through “likes or shares”. Such is the importance of social networks in today’s daily life that even a birthday greeting is done through the network, as we can see in the article “Antisocial Networking” says:  Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’.

One of the ways that companies use social networks today is the direct communication with consumers or potential consumers, as it did 20 years ago through the TV companies conduct advertising campaigns and marketing through social networking platforms. Another way is that companies use social networks to study the behavior of consumers, which product they prefer, how much are they willing to pay, through which channel they prefer to buy it, etc. This is one of the ways we are helping more companies today because they can adapt their products and services to the immediate needs of consumers without spending money on it.

Due to social networks now people do not need to live in the same city to communicate, share experiences and learn about the daily life of others, which is a big plus for families who do not live in the same city, distance couples or for anyone traveling around the world.

The problem here is that nobody is wondering themselves what happens with all personal and non-personal information that rise to the network. Where it goes? Who else can use it? Which level of privacy we have?. The issue of privacy is very ambiguous and no user is able to say you have 100% privacy of your information in the network, even the creator of face book’s sister, posted a picture in her private Facebook page, ensuring that this photo was private just for her friends and she does not know how a completely unknown woman got the picture and twit it. This case is explained in the article “Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn’t Private”.

Personally I believe that social networks are a very useful tool but all active members should be more careful about what they post, because nothing is private on the network.