Posts tagged ‘virtual worlds’
Where Is Here?
by Barry Chudakov on November 30th, 2011“People used to walk with eyes to the sand and water,” using the example of people strolling at the seashore. “Now everyone walks with a device. No one is looking at the sand…. The technology which looked so good 15 to 20 years ago now looks like it helps us miss out on the complexities and grittiness and ups and downs of what real life has to offer.” – Sherry Turkle
We’ve misplaced our nouns. Our persons, places and things used to be here somewhere, but now they are somewhere else. Persons, aka friends, are not here. The lights from our gadgets beckon, we’re skin-hungry and still they’re out there somewhere, at the end of a text or swimming in our Facebook stream. Places like bookstores, once here, are now booted to a virtual there, accessible easily from millions, even billions, of devices but these are not the place—they are access to the place. And things! We now have an Internet of things, a horn of plenty of stuff that is connected to other stuff. Most of that stuff isn’t here either.
The Gaming Metalife
by Barry Chudakov on April 26th, 2010Let’s start with the obvious: gaming is big business. While much has been made of the Apple iPhone app economy, it pales by comparison with gaming. Money is one way to measure our involvement with gaming; time is another. The average number of hours spent gaming per week has gone up from 7.3 hours in 2009 to 8 hours in 2010. This graphic from Online MBA provides an excellent overview: