Writing Online

Robert Hof speculates on “What the Internet will be like in the future.”

For all the visual appeal of avatars and slick 3D graphics, they could prove to be mere trappings of a bigger change in how people use the Internet — one only hinted at by the current crush of so-called Web 2.0 companies.

Above all, virtual worlds hold the potential to transform social interaction online: In contrast to the Web, where there’s almost no assumption of a human heartbeat behind the Web page, virtual worlds are inherently social settings. “You go up to an avatar and you know there’s a real person on the other end,” says Joe Miller, vice-president for platform and technology development at Second Life creator Linden Lab.

If the New York Times is any indication, newspapers will eventually stop the printing presses and go fully online. From an article by Richard Koman (Silicon Valley Watcher),

NYT pub Arthur Sulzberger suggests that the debate over how far online newspapers must go is over in an interview with Haaretz.com. He sees his job as shepherding the times onto the Internet while maintaining profit margins – and “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.”

It seems “real” world publishing is integrating fully into a “virtual” world.

Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology, has a fascinating, 4 1/2 minute video (Web 2.0 … The Web is Us/ing Us) on the influence of digital text, and thus, the web, on us, and vice versa (via jill/txt). In particular, the separation of content from form (i.e., the code, such as html and xml) has enabled easy web authoring, blogging, wikis, and other online writing tools. The video shows how it isn’t just information that is linked on the web, but people as they collaborate and link to one another. What does that mean with respect with differentiating between “real” and “virtual” reality, online and offline identity, authorship and copyright, …?

Clay Shirky, a well-known author on things internet, in his post “Second Life, Games, and Virtual Worlds,” asks:

will Second Life become a platform for a significant online population? And, second, what can Second Life tell us about the future of virtual worlds generally?

It is the second question that connects to our upcoming readings on virtual reality. Shirky states:

With that said, I don’t believe that “virtual worlds” describes a coherent category, or, put another way, the group of things lumped together as virtual worlds have such variable implementations and user adoption rates that they are not well described as a single conceptual group.

Shirky goes on to note the differences between games and other virtual worlds, asserting that it will be some time before technology can advance enough to make those other worlds as popular as games, to enable them “re-create the full sense of being in someone’s presence in a mediated environment.”

As we blog and create our websites, we should be asking ourselves how the design and environment of our blogs and websites mediate communication and interaction among us and others.

Soon, we’ll be talking about virtual reality. One popular virtual environment is Second Life. David Dewit (Athens News) writes about it, “Virtual-reality software creates parallel campus, enhances education“, and how it’s being used in an upper-division rhetoric and composition course at Ohio University taught by Paul Shovlin:

But [Shovlin's] interest is really in the effects of the environment itself. He said he wanted his students to think critically about the appearance and impressions they were giving off, demonstrating to them that if his avatar looked like Darth Vader, they wouldn’t take him seriously.

“Rhetoric is the art of persuasion,” he said. “A certain appearance in virtual reality can affect ethos and credibility.”

Shovlin said that at the end of his course he wanted students to become critical agents, to take care of themselves in the virtual environment of Second Life and translate that to other environments.

“That’s what I think literacy is,” he said, “adapting and being successful in different environments in terms of our communication.”

“Writing in Cyberspace” has similar interests. As we blog, build websites, and write online, we need to consider how online environments impact our writing as compared to print environments, to think critically about those differences, and transfer and “translate” our writing into new environments.

Here are some newspaper articles (via Complexity Digest) looking at cyberspace:

Could this be the final chapter in the life of the book? Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times, 07/01/21

Putting a Second Life first David LaGesse, U.S. News and World Report, 07/01/21

Virtual reality spreading in business world CNN, 07/01/17