3pointD.com

Forbes.com discovers virtual worlds today, but slightly misses the point. Their article on Reshaping Reality hits a couple of good points, but winds up characterizing virtual worlds as something too removed from the world around us.

High points:

Cheap, widely distributed bandwidth and advanced networking technologies are divorcing an ever-growing segment of the population from traditionally “real” constraints like geography and socio-economic status.

Fast-forward ten years and today’s teens will be tomorrow’s young execs. And they will be incredibly comfortable meeting and collaborating with people from around the globe—people whom they’ve only met online in a virtual world.

Where the article turns south is when it declares that “people are becoming more ‘unreal’ as well, while things that we used to consider abstract—like money—are actually becoming more ‘real.’” It then goes on to quote Jaron Lanier as saying, “Money and people are switching roles.” I’m not sure where that quote comes from, but I’ll disagree for an X. I think it’s important, as we develop new technologies, not to lose sight of who it is that’s using them. Interactions may be changing, but people remain what they always have been. It’s up to us to develop technologies that recognize that fact, rather than glossing over it.

It’s also important to remember that occupying a virtual world doesn’t actually remove you from the real one. The last paragraph of the Forbes.com piece:

For millennia, people have had little option but to accept a reality that was imposed upon them externally. Social and economic opportunities were dictated primarily by brute geography. That world is disappearing. Now we are beginning to impose our internal realities upon the external world. And what could be more exciting—or more frightening—than getting to choose your own reality?

No one is choosing their own reality. The world is becoming ever more interconnected, but you’re still sitting in a room somewhere, even when you’re cruising through World of Warcraft or Second Life. These worlds are extensions of the real world around us, not replacements or impositions. They’ll be much more useful to us if we think of them that way.