!Xabbu was silent for a long moment. They hung side by side, twin stars floating in an empty black sky, two angels gazing down from heaven at the immensity of humankind’s commercial imagination.
Otherland: The City of the Golden Shadow, Tad Williams
For anyone not familiar with Virtual Worlds, they are massive, online environments where people can meet, interact and play. Any definition is inevitably a simplification of the actual level of development these online worlds represent. People, in virtual worlds are no longer merely playing a game, they are living out a parallel existence where they have relationships, wage epic battles, get married, have virtual children, buy and sell goods such as clothing and real-estate, go to virtual online clubs for entertainment, change their appearance, hold down jobs, create empires, kill and be killed, learn and educate. In essence, if it exists in the real world, it exists in the virtual world. Virtual world inhabitants are living a virtual life driven as much by imagination, hope, vanity, desire, ambition, and sex as is their everyday life in the real world.
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It seems the dam that is the flow of information has completely burst and the great global conversation is raging through the neurons of all of us who choose to jack in.
I attended another social media forum yesterday (a good one by the way Zone5ive ) and decided it was time to take another look at Twitter. I looked at it a bit over a year ago and it didn't grab me but now, it seems to be a very different thing. The information seems more relevent and the tweets more thoughtful. Of course, it's me finally being ready for it rather than the other way round.
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