The Virtual World: Living a Second Life
What if you were too frightened to go outside of your house? Then what? Well, you might be able to live a decent life in the virtual worlds like Second Life. Perhaps it would even be an interesting one.
And even if you’re not exploring the virtual possibilities out of fear, you may still find a lot of interesting things there to entertain and educate yourself. But you could also just find experiences to reinforce your existing world view.
There are now people in Japan, primarily young people, who stay in their rooms 24 hours a day, afraid to leave, and spending all their time in online worlds. This is an extreme reaction to the stresses of the modern world, to be sure, but the fact that there are enough of these people to constitute a trend gives us a glimpse of the how people can be psychologically damaged by modern society.
And many companies are experimenting with Second Life to conduct meetings, so that people don’t have to travel. British Petroleum has its own private island in Second Life where an advanced research group is experimenting with meeting spaces and project team rooms.
If people stopped going to real meetings, and only went to virtual ones, what would happen to the travel industry?