The original virtual world

Thanks to replies to my last post. I didn't even realize I had comments until I started clicking around the pages. It seems I didn't spend as much time as I thought getting to know my way around the site. Another thing I haven't figured out is the first post that I made, I can see it from the Google Reader listings, but not from the blog site. hmmmm. I wonder what happened. If you by chance didn't read it, and can't see it on Goggle reader like I can, it was about a book I had finished that day. I am a huge reader and make it a point to read every day, some days I read more than I do anything else.

But anyway, I feel that reading a good story puts you in the original virtual world. When you read fiction, you are in essence being put into the story--the thoughts and the feelings. If you are into the story, you experience the emotions your characters are feeling, your physical being responds, your respiration increases, your natural hormones kick in. Fear, anger, sorrow, happiness, arousal, they all become real to YOU, even though all you are doing is reading a story about a fictional person that someone else wrote.

Today people talk about playing online and virtual games. Aren't they the same thing except instead of having words on a page that your mind uses to create that virtual world, you are looking at a screen and your eyes transmit those images to your brain and then you become immersed in that virtual world? Except its less work for your brain because all the sensory input has already been created for you. Its much easier to accept the created world when the colors are chosen for you, the placement of object are pre-selected and the look of everything is done for you.

This has opened up virtual worlds to a whole new group of people who would never have bothered to open up a book, or who have difficulting reading with fluency. I think this is a great thing. But... and you had to know there was a but in there somewhere. LOL But I think many people have lost sight of the fact that someone still had to write the programming and create and write the characters and possiblities that online virtual worlds contain. The ideas and the work had to come from someone's mind. As long as we have people who are creative and can express thoughts and ideas to people in different ways, we are going to see the virtual world continue to expand and evolve in different ways in years and generations to come.

To blog or not to blog...

I've never been a big fan of blogging. I hear some people talking at work about how they read "blah blah" on this blog and "blah de blah" on that blog. Then they ask me if I subscribe to (insert famous person's name here)'s blog and I say no. Personally, I have too many things going on in my life, I don't have enough time in the day to do all the things I have to do, and want to do, to spend my time reading about what other people think on a daily basis. If you want to use it as a journaling tool, thats great, but its just not my thing. I write articles and stories to share with other people and I journal privately in a notebook for myself.

I do email, only a small percentage of what I used to do in years past. I have cut out alot of the time wasting emails that used to plague my inbox by politely telling my friends and family to stop forwarding me things that they think are cute or that I should pass on. When I get online, I have a specific purpose, I want to spend my time doing that, not wading through a hour of "pass this to 7 people in the next hour" crap. I instant message during work hours, because our system has its own messenger program to let the employees communicate with each other. I do use yahoo messenger occasionally to talk to family members, but after spending 8 hours a day on a computer at work, I usually don't feel like spending any more time online. About 9-10 years ago I could be found at my PC, running AOL, MSN and ICQ IMs chatting away most of the day. But I found that got in the way of real life. I also used to do a lot of yahoo groups. Those were lively email days when you'd open mail and find 300 emails to read. Again, it got to be too much, and those got deleted one at a time.

I think web 2.0, virtual reality and all the interactive stuff out there is really cool and has so many wonderful possibilities, but I think too many people spend too much of their time in virtual worlds and not enough time in the real world.