Tutorial 5 - MSN, FACEBOOK (and other social networking websites) VS VIRTUAL REALITY

What are the qualitative differences between the regular IM program and a 3D environment?

On the social networking sites that I have used, communication happened primarily between people who I know and who know me from real life. This means a level of social skill and etiquette is still required when communicating in MySpace, FaceBook and so on, unlike virtual reality worlds. Also, whilst I am sure some of the things that are posted on these sites aren’t true, because communication happened primarily between people who know each other, in my case anyway, there was (usually) at least an element of truth in what was posted. Another point is you have control over who can enter your world unlike 3d worlds such as Active Worlds.

When I logged into Active World I found the fact that these people were all strangers to me a little disconcerting. In social networking sites, I would never contact someone I didn’t know in real life unless I had a specific purpose for doing so. In Active Worlds you are expected to just walk up to someone and say ‘hi’, a process that for some reason I found a little embarrassing. Because you are in essence a completely different persona to the real world, you can be, act, say, look how you want, in other words, you are making your own reality. I think this is a difference between and social networking site and VR sites. Social networking sites are based in the real world, VR sites are based in a ‘made up’ version that people wish to project to the real world. Interestingly, I ask a user called ‘Mom_DJ’ what it is that she likes about Active Worlds and she said she had made heaps of wonderful friends. I then asked her if she knew any from the real world and she replied that she had never met or even seen her ‘wonderful’ friends in the real world and that she had no desire to.

Whilst I realize this is a subjective area, in my opinion VR sites are for people that for whatever reason wish to escape the ‘real’ world (not that there is anything wrong with that), whilst social networking are for people that wish to enhance it.