After reading the artcile, "Just you me, but better" (or something like that), I decided to do more research into the world of avatars. I have never actually made an avatar befor. I was never into the SIMS game or really looked around online for alternative worlds where we would find these avatars. This article discusses how one company wanted to make it so that you didnt have to create a seperate avatar with every internet world you would join. You would create on avatar and he would travel with you from site to site. It seems like the real world, when you go to knew places and meet knew people, you build relationships that carry with you no matter where you go. You have a reputation and people know you you are ven if you venture out of you home town. It seems that this is what they are trying to accomplish with the avatars. I do feel that this will make people more accountable to how they behave online. You cant hide behind multiple avatars that all look the same. This is one step further in technology to try to make cyber world like the real world. You guys should take a look at this artcile from the New York Times, it is pretty interesting :)
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/free-the-avatars/?scp=1&sq=Avatars&st=Search
The conference the article mentioned took place in 2007 in San Jose and was where the plans were announced that a group was beginning to work to develop the open standards that would allow avatars to move between virtual communities. I wanted to see what had happened since then, so I went online to discover that as recently as February 23 of this year, IBM announced that it had achieved the first recorded teleport of avatars from one virtual world to another.
ReplyDeleteIn your posting, you wrote that people build relationships that carry on with them no matter where they go and that people have reputations that are recognized by others. I have a different way to look at this. I would say that in real life, a person adapts to the particular environment he or she is in and to the people with whom he or she is associated. Therefore, a person isn’t the same in one environment as another, or with one person as he or she is with another. So I’m don’t see the attempt to make only one avatar represent the same person in all virtual worlds as a move toward real life, but rather away from real life.
However, I do see that it would be a convenience for people to use the same avatar rather than to have to make one for each virtual world. From this aspect, I see the technology being developed in the way the author of the article we read this week, “The technology and the society,” seems to prefer: The technology is being developed with a certain purpose already in mind—to make life easier the way society seems to want it.
Your response to the article you read was very interesting. I took a look at the website you attached and I find it to be intriguing that this company wants to link avatars to people and have that avatar follow you as you navigate through the World Wide Web. I think this is a small glimpse of future technologies and ideas; one day the real world and internet world will not be very different from each other. People will for sure be more accountable if they are represented by avatars. Perhaps people will not be as rude, creepy, and disrespectful. Hopefully more good comes out of this idea than bad. Interesting article, thanks!
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