Digitized Lives Response

After reading the book "Digitized Lives" by Reed, I was quite interest about one of the topic he addressed: Is there a virtual world/ real-world divide? With the development of digital technologies we created thousands of cyberspaces. Nowadays, people with access to the virtual world can have the wonderful experiences with it. I believe that it is because of these online and offline experiences caused us to have the idea that there is a boundary between the two world, and many people even consider the virtual world is "not real".

I am not quite sure about the idea the we should consider virtual world and real world as two completely different and separate worlds since our body can't tell the differences. For example, people who played video games can experience excitement, raising of the blood-pressure, fear, etc. Apparently that human bodies cannot tell the difference of a virtual reality from real-world even though our brain knows that it is not actually "real". That's why military uses simulator to train soldiers. The virtual reality technology allows its uses to immersed into the computer generated 3D environment and interact with it. The experience of a virtual reality can be just like interact with the real-environment. An Japanese anime called "Sword Art Online" described a devised that take over user's brain signal allows its users to immerse into a virtual world without feeling anything from the real-world.If that technology came true one day people might not even be able to tell which world are we actually live in.  Based on players' experiences there isn't much differences between virtual world and real-world. As I was doing my research, I found a interesting theory called "Reality–virtuality continuum". According to the theory, there is no clear boundary between the two realities. As the real environment and virtual environment are the two opposite extremes on the continuum they forms a area called mixed reality between them.

Virtual world is deeply connected to our life. Online community like Facebook and Twitter even become one of the most important part in out society. All these digital technologies, devices, and internet are influencing the way we live. In my opinion, the virtual world is overlapping with real worlds nowadays. Therefor, I think it is quite impossible divide them into completely separated world.

However, even though human bodies can't tell the differences between virtual world and real-world, we still consider them as two different worlds. I think one of the big issues is the access to the virtual world. digital devices are just like portals to the virtual world. With the improvement of technology there are more and more digital devices and it's quality also became better. However, the access to the well functional digital device and internet is still a big problem. As Reed mentioned in his book, one of the geography of the Internet is "the place user is accessing". Yet, as I learned most of these places is at the developed country. Most of the world nowadays doesn't have the ability to interact with the virtual world. According to the chart the author provided there is only 11.4% of the population in India have the access to Internet. Even country like China have more than half of the population don't get the access to internet. The film " Virtual Revolution" made by BBC addressed that about 80% of the people on this planet do not have the access to internet and Africa is just starting to interact with the internet. Furthermore, I believe many of the internet users are not interact with virtual world as frequently as young generations like us. Therefore, since people still see the world without connection to the virtual world a lot it gives us the feelings that the two world is different and we should view them differently.

In a nutshell, there is still a long way that digital technology need to go. I believe that with the development of the digital technologies the boundary between virtual world and real-world became blurry. Maybe one day we will reach 80% of internet users in the world and I believe that world will be very different.