My Avatars Will Get In Touch With Your Avatars…

My youngest son is deep into World of WarCraft (See the articles Wow Wii!, june, 2009). He plays at the highest level with fellow players all over the world. He puts on his headphones, fires up WoW and he’s good for hours…literally hours if not days! Thank god for school or there would be no reason to stop at all. On one hand I can’t discourage him, on top of the all the hours he spends playing he’s also picked up on how operating systems work, how to set up a network router and install software on his own. He even (though he’s loathe to admit it) knows a bit about programming (flash, of course). Being in the “computer” business myself, like any father I want him to be ready to go into the world on his own one day. And nobody knows better than I, that requires and will continue to require, a very high degree of computer literacy, at least in my own field. And I assume, almost every other.

Still, I also wonder what ever happened to the old “going outside to play” school of growing up. Apparently, every kid hears this from their dad if they have one. They write about it in books popular with today’s 12 year olds.

When I was a kid (…yes, I’m saying it..), video games like pong and donkey kong were fun but really just a few steps up from checkers and “Go Fish”. The real fun was playing with other kids, first, hide and seek and ringalerio, kickball and tag. Then as we got older, baseball, football, hockey or basketball with the local kids was the point to every weekend; weekdays too, if you had time after school. Way back then families had numerous kids so it was never hard to find other boys and girls my age (give or take 2 or 3 years) interested in doing the same crazy things we all liked. Of course, it wasn’t always about athletics since most of us weren’t particularly “athletic”. It was more about playing. More importantly, it was what we now called “social networking”. Web 1.0 (or lower) was basically kids in the same neighborhood creating a world of their own. Some kids you really liked, some you really hated but most were just somewhere in between. What we had in common, was that we were all just kids. We fought each other, we helped each other, we teased each other, we were sometimes downright mean to each other. But in one way or another we all somehow KNEW each other. Our strengths, our weakness, who was good at what and who wasn’t. We knew whose brother liked who’s cousin’s sister and whether or not she liked him back.

When I see my son hooked into his WoW colleagues, I ask myself is this any different? Ok, instead of the kids being across the street or down the block or in a neighborhood that had its own name, they could be anywhere in the world. He could be chatting it up and planning strategy with kids his own age or full-grown adults, all insid this ultimate fantasy come alive on a video screen. Is this leading to a more open, broad-minded world where my son will grow up and be influenced by lives and personalities thousands of miles away in some cases? Does this mean he’ll learn more, know more and do more by the time he finishes high school than I have yet to do in my entire lifetime? That would be nice, but something tells me it simply not that simple. My son my be interacting with people from all over the world but in reality he’s interacting with World of WarCraft and all the technologies that bring this wonder to millions. Its the technology that’s becoming a part of their lives…not each other.
For the reasons I expressed earlier, this alone was not alarming. But once I saw the following:

Life is Too Short for Social Interaction

Since I’m in the “viral” business, “viral apps” aren’t knew to me. Yes, this is meant to be a “parody”, but to be absolutely honest when I first saw this video I took it at face value. I actually believed Google had launched a product called Xistance. Why not, I’m part of the “Google World” and they launch new products practically every day? Nothing wrong with that. So when I as watching this I was naturally thinking, yeah, my boy would love that! Maybe I should tell him about it? Until, of course, I heard the final tag line, “Life is too short for Social Interaction”! My eyebrows furrowed but the question remained, would my son embrace this technology as something desirable? I don’t think so, he’s a very social fellow. (He has more friends on Facebook than I ever hope of having) But if there were such a product I can see him and many more like him not scoffing at it but eagerly signing up. Will Web 3.0 go beyond giving us new venues to express ourselves and keep in touch, or does it mean just the opposite, living our lives behind an impenetrable “cyber wall” that is far more “real” to some than anything going on in the “outside world”? What can breathing “fresh” air ever offer over the Kingdom of the Droids? Who’s to say?