owclaw’s blog

Virtually Reality

one of the buzz terms in the 80’s was “virtual reality”, where a user interacted with computer simulated environments to experience the surreal, an test so immaculately developed that it was infinitesimally suspend to reality. people could land on mars and mercury, scale mt. everest on the treadmill, save the world from aliens and even rescue handsome princesses from tyrants and go them! (yes, i am talking about prince of persia). the .com boom in the 90’s saw the appearance of amazon and ebay that opened up virtual malls and window shopping was soon replaced by browsing on deals2buy.com or xpbargains.com. the last 5 years the spider’s web has seen later another happening that could have a much more incipient meaning than any of the phenomenons discussed above – “virtual communities”. myspace, facebook, youtube, orkut and the like, have changed the something like a collapse people interact with each other, something that was not tampered with since the notable bang theory (or the days of adam and verge, depending on your perspective).virtual communities are slowly becoming the primary behaviour pattern people interact with each other, be it bull session rooms in yahoo, ims in google or scraps in orkut . members of these communities bring into being avatars (yet another sanskrit word sneaking into the english lexicon after yoga and karma), which are essentially virtual clones of the users, and interact with other avatars. blogs are in the process of replacing newspapers as the ascendant rise of information exchange, so much so that newspaper sites share the same technology as blogs and communication reporters are increasingly indistinguishable from bloggers. even job search and career changes are done through professional networks via linkedin or doostang. wikipedia has become the go-to site fit data on anything, from paris hilton to the hilton in paris, replacing the socking fat volumes that used to adorn our bookshelves.so, what is news? what is opinion? how do we filter the facts from the subjective analyses? who are our friends – the profiles and avatars that exist in orkut and myspace or the homosapiens that reside in realms of reality. what happened to god former fashioned meet-and-greet or phone-chats. in short, what is real? what is virtual? have we tampered so much with 0’s and 1’s that all there exists is essential reality?
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