Get a Life

I’m not a Second Life fan but I am getting sick of the bashing users get in the media. Most recent was this piece by British newsreader John Humphrys that was emailed to me by a friend.

Check out what he has to say:

Tens of millions of people in this country and around the world appear to have reverted to childhood. They spend extraordinary amounts of their time inhabiting an imaginary world

So the misfit with no friends becomes a hunky sex god, lusted after by beautiful women with unfeasibly perfect bodies

Puzzled because I could not understand how perfectly intelligent people with apparently busy lives could spend even ten minutes engaging in such childish pursuits.

I fear a world in which children grow up believing that what matters is how many “friends” they have on their internet site or in their fantasy world rather than in the real world.

I have a tiny number of friends compared to Facebook or MySpace users. But they are real friends in every sense of the word. I may not see them often, but I know they are there.

So what he is basically saying is using a virtual world is childish and that people should get “real friends” even if you don’t see them very often because that is more real. Give me a break.

He claims his friends are real, even though he doesn’t physically see them. Hello? How are my online friends any less “real”? I speak to them every day so surely I have more evidence of their reality than the learned newsreader?

To assert that a friendship mediated by a computer is less of a friendship than one conducted over the telephone is preposterous. I thought these guys were meant to be intelligent journalists.

It gets worse though, he pulls out the child porn trump card:

Nick Schader, a reporter with the investigative television programme Report Mainz and a member of Second Life, said he had been “shocked” by the virtual child pornography meetings to which he was invited for 500 Linden dollars - around £1.50.

Yes, these acts are sick and twisted but that doesn’t make every virtual world or user a sleaze. It seems media commentary around these worlds always has to fall into the hype or fear monger categories. When are journalists going to catch on that these environments are populated with people, and all that entails?

Photo by Cosmic Kitty

Posted on January 22, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Web 2.0

Comments

2 Responses to “Get a Life”

  1. Pete Bollini on January 23rd, 2008 4:03 am

    I agree with Humphrys. Social life, i.e. friends and family, is necessary to the human condition. We are a social animal and social animals maintain their sociability by touching each other and looking into each other’s eyes. There is also a mixing of chemicals exuded by our bodies that has a certain influence. All this together means contact. Second life et al are not about contact. They are about a shared imaginary world where many of its members are a little bit sick and the illness is spreading. Some, a few, of course are exceptions.

  2. Chris Garrett on January 23rd, 2008 10:54 am

    Yes face to face is better, agreed, but that is not what he is saying. He’s suggested that his friends are somehow better because he knows they exist even if he never speaks to them whereas friends made over the internet are less real even though they are met virtually more often than his “real” friends?

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