Even Better Than The Real Thing
Mother Jones Online makes me think and frequently makes me laugh. Their article, “Even Better Than The Real Thing,” does both.
Why do people get hooked on their virtual lives? Because of my medical issues, I’m more or less house-bound. However, I know I can do things in Second Life that I can’t in Real Life: I’m nesting, building and furnishing a virtual house on virtual land which I’m leasing, on a virtual island that is the ultimate aging hippy’s daydream. I can even make a buck doing art: I “sold” one of my 3d graphics images to a friend, and have been told I should post them in a gallery, and take in some real money. (I’m of two minds on that.)
My therapist tells me that this is a good thing; I’m connecting to other people and exploring outside the confines of my apartment.
I wonder, though, if or when I’ll cross the line…
May 24th, 2007 at 11:00pm
A thought-provoking post on a thought-provoking article, Arondelle. I’ve never engaged in a virtual online world… beyond the text-based one intrinsic to the blogosphere… but I have thought a lot about how much of my life is online, and eventually decided not to worry about it.
I am not quite housebound… I can walk a block to the grocery store, though I can no longer walk blocks in the political sense, and I can still drive my car, though I have my limits in that department… but I spend a great deal of time, working or relaxing, at home alone. My blog is inevitably the vehicle for my online persona (not all that different from the meatspace one), and my blog friends are my real friends. It has come to the point that my few meatspace friends that have not moved away from here nonetheless communicate with me through email and the blog more than by phone or in person.
Given all that, why should we not live online for our own comfort and social enrichment?
A good friend of mine became addicted to The Sims before it became an online environment. She is another artistic sort, solitary by inclination (apart from her day job and occasional jazz rehearsals and gigs, she spends vast amounts of time working on her photos, toward the next show or other event). On my blog, she appears occasionally as Lotus’s human. Social interaction via the internet suits some of us very well.
Stella, apart from being my long-time s.o., is one of the very few people I actually see f2f on an almost daily basis. Even so, we email and phone a lot. (We haven’t gotten into texting yet.)
One more thing, and I’m done with this unfocused ramble: go ahead and sell your artwork in the “real” world if you can use the money. I performed music for pay for many years, and doing so never compromised my artistic integrity… heh… even a little bit.
May 27th, 2007 at 2:42pm
You’ve definitely crossed the boarder, and you’ll never come back as the same person you were. All the Best from your co-patient Jimmy from Second Life