Virtual Worlds

Virtual world is a world that creates by its users online, such as Second Life. It is "a model that represents the reality." It allows users to create their own "avatars," design any kind of characters they want to be. Everything that appears on virtual world is "created, distributed, and consumed by the user themselves," such as building, object and fashion (Bakshy, Eytan, Karrer, Brian and Adamic Lada A. 2010). In Virtual world, users can assign different characters as they are in real lives. They can do anything they want that they might not or cannot do in the real world.

In virtual world, such as Second Life, people can create their own personality, who they want to be. They can design how they look like, what clothing to wear. They can buy lands, build houses and decorated them as they want, plant tree with different colors and own property. They can dance, jump, swim and even fly in the virtual world.

Virtual world can be used in many different fields. According to Linden Lab, there are "more than 1,400 organizations - including large companies, educational institutions, government agencies and even the U.S. military - use Second Life to hold meetings, conduct training and prototype new technologies more efficiently" (Tutton, Mark 2009).

For many companies, they use Second Life throughout their operation, such as IBM. According to IBM's chief technology officer - Rashik Parmar, IBM have used Second Life to meet up those leaders, gather information and ideas from the people around the world, instead of travel around. In this way, it will save a lot of time. IBM also created Sametime 3D which gives businesses opportunities to "share ideas and collaboration in a 3 D world" (Tutton, Mark 2009). In the field of education, there are some instructors set up their meeting in virtual worlds instead of classroom. It will provide more learning experience for students. They can distribute group work, share ideas, discuss topic and do the projects together. It is a good platform for people to meet up and gather things together. Second Life also provides job training for people. It gives out different situations that could happen in the company which give out experiences to employees dealing on those problems. So, it will help employees more quickly solve problems if they really come in reality since they already experienced them in virtual world. For disable people, there are limited of things they can do in real world, and might not accomplish their dreams as they wish because their disability. Second Life is a place where they can design a totally different life for themselves. They can create themselves as a healthy person, do the thing they like to do and achieve their dreams in virtual world. For instance, in the real world some disable who have difficulty to travel around, but they can walk, run, fly in virtual world. They can experiences the things that they can't experience in real lives.

However, virtual world is not all positive, it still bring some negative effects to the society. There are all of the sex, porn, drug and suicide that can occur in virtual world, because for the things that people cannot really do in the real world, they might want to get satisfy in virtual world. As the doctor explains that "if teenagers participate in an activity online, they are more likely to want to do it in real life" (Stern Allen 2008). Teenagers might also spend too much time on it, stay in their virtual world and isolate themselves to real world. Like man other online service, there are cyber crimes can occur in virtual world because you would not know the people you deal with online what their real personality are. It gives chance for those people to committee crimes.

I think virtual worlds is not popular as social networking now, but it will become more popular in the future, since there are more and more people participated it. In future, schools might provide virtual world course and let students participate in virtual world, take the virtual world as sample of real world and demostrate the different issues that occur in the reality in order to teach them lessons. It will also produces more activities and functions to the users, such as allows the users to write blogs and post them in their virtual world. Of course, there is need for regulation and rules to protect the users and give them a safety place to participated because some people are always tried to find some weakness part and take the advantage from it.

Citation:

Eytan Bakshy, Brian Karrer, and Lada A. Adamic. (July 6, 2010) Social Influence and the Diffusion of User - Created Content by Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, Stanford CA.

Tutton, Mark (Nov 9, 2009). Going to the Virtual Office in Second Life, CNN.com

Stern, Allen (Aug 26, 2008), NBC News: " The Dark Side of the Web is Second Life". Center Networks