My GoogleEarth Tour

Virtual Realities

Virtual realities serve as escapes for people who are either unhappy or searching for something different from their daily lives. When someone goes onto a website like Second Life or starts to play a game like War of Worldcraft, it is like entering a new dimension. What seems ordinary and depressing about said persons real life is totally different and magical in his or her "second life" or "virtual space". As seen in the documentary "Second Skin", some people get so sucked into this game space, that their real lives become almost impossible to live by. They find themselves finding love, happiness, and success on websites that serve as their avatars. What someone from the outside might ask is how is it possible to find true happiness in the form of a virtual game. Or to the people who can no longer understand what is reality and what is virtual, the question then becomes quite literally: what is real? The same question that New has to ask when he is trying to figure out what exactly the Matrix is.

Plato's use of the allegory of the cave can be used to explain those who are unhappy in their real lives and use virtual games and websites for escapes. To these people, when they find these virtual spaces, a new world has opened up to them. When coming back to their reality, it could be described as a sort of darkness, as Socrates describes to Glaucon when discussing the return to the cave.

The virtual reality spaces are the red pill that one might take to get out of the Matrix. As depicted by the subjects in Second Skin, their entire lives become revolved around these virtual realities. These people meet their husbands and wives, their friends, their colleagues, and have a social life that is completely involved with their virtual reality spaces.

Interesting article related to this topic:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-mcgonigal/video-games_b_823208.html

Tranquillity vs. Stress at The New School

Daily Encounters

The Medium is the Message

When Marshall McLuhan stated that “the medium is the message” he was stating something that should have been completely obvious to us all—that with each new medium that is introduced, it comes from something that previously existed. As I was reading this piece by McLuhan, I couldn’t help but think of Facebook, and the juggernaut it has become. Before Facebook came LiveJournal, MySpace, and most importantly, the internet. But all of this is overlooked by the small fact that Facebook has become this bruit force that is able to reach 100’s of millions of people in countries that one probably didn’t even know had internet, and everyone seems to overlook how Mark Zuckerberg could even come up with something like this. It’s as if people think that he didn’t have the history of the medium he was using to create such a revolutionary communicative device. McLuhan stated “many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message” (McLuhan 203). And while this is true to an extent, a clear history of the medium is how all of our current information is able to rise.