The World Egg
New worlds, new humanity

I used to be be an avid reader of Dave Pollard’s blog at How to Save the World; somehow, over the past year I kind of dropped out of the habit. Right now, there are 128 articles queued up for me to read in my RSS reader!

Anyone who’s read this blog lately will know that I’ve become increasingly interested in the various virtual worlds out there, as well as in augmented reality, and in the effects it will have on business and society. One element of all this is how we construct our identity in each virtual world, how we manage any differences in what we put into each identity, and how we communicate using one identity with someone who got to know us in another.

Of course this isn’t new: the simple fact that we change anyway over time means that most of us have had the experience of meeting someone we used to know, and realised that perhaps they haven’t changed much but we have. It’s uncomfortable, having someone trying to interact with you as the person you used to be rather than who you are now.

This is likely to become more common as we inhabit more and more ‘worlds’ - and let’s be clear that many of us will live in several different realities at one time! This is what brought me back to Dave Pollard. I forget now which blog it was, but someone wrote a short piece linking to this excellent blog post: Conversation in virtual communities: what happens when you change from one medium of communication to another?

He takes the following channels of communication as his starting point for a very interesting discussion:

1. e-Mail
2. chat/IM
3. chat/IM plus virtual presence (using an avatar)
4. v2v (voice to voice)
5. v2v plus virtual presence (using an avatar)
6. v2v plus virtual presence (using a webcam)
7. f2f (face to face)

Check it out.