Why am I only now suddenly realising that Virtual Reality is an oxymoron? 🤦♀️
what is the future of some sort of virtual reality being marketed as community?
I'm currently watching an anime series with my daughter called Shangri-La Fromtier which is based on a near future where many immerse themselves in online games via VR headsets. (I think there are a fair few movies that have this story line as well.) While the main story is the game play there is a parallel one running where a girl he goes to school with and barely notices has taken a shine to him and is trying to approach him in the game because she's too scared to in the real world. This virtual reality seems to be coming along at a much faster pace than I ever expected. My daughter recently got herself a VR headset and got me to try it. It's pretty amazing and I could never have imagined it becoming reality when I was a kid. It gave me motion sickness, though, so I won't be rushing to go back on it.
every minute I spend in front of my computer screen, typing away on my keyboard, is one less minute I have away from it, interacting with people in the real world.
And those minutes go by very fast when we're engrossed in a screen. Just today I had a quick check of my Instagram and the next thing I knew an hour had gone by! If you've ever read the story of The Grey Gentlemen (AKA Momo) you'll know what I mean if I say that it feels like the Grey Gentlemen have paid a visit every time you look at a screen.
Do these interactions have all the richness and diversity available to us when interacting with people in the real world?
It has been suggested that we are losing the ability to read facial expressions and body language the more we interact socially online over in the meatspace (as @ryivhnn so eloquently put it). We certainly didn't evolve to not need physical interaction with other people and I see us fracturing more and more with each generation as a species.
I'm an introvert, but I grew up in a world without internet, when mobile phones were only just being invented. Therefore I had to learn to interact with people and deal with unfamiliar situations via communicating directly. My daughter is also an introvert, but with so much now automated, online and communication easily done with texts, she has been able to avoid a lot of face to face interactions and struggled much more than me to learn to interact with others.
I'm going to sign off here as it's past my bed time. No sunlight to head out into until tomorrow now, sadly.
@tipu curate 8
Very good, @minismallholding.
In the first sentence of your response, you have discerned what I would consider the heart of the challenge, for ours or any conversation surrounding the word community. And why I titled my post with the key words intended to stimulate a bit more critical thinking about it.
Your example from your family, with your daughter, is very sobering to me. Where the struggle comes, at least in part, is through the initial enticement of whatever it is with which we are being tempted. It is always appears attractive, at least at first. Part of that appeal, in my view, is we are only given part of the story. By design? Well, there is another topic which endlessly has been and will be written about.
Yes, we had to learn. Our younger generations are also learning. They are just not the same lessons. Any honest and open examination of how that is going should lead to some challenging questions, at a minimum.
Some of which can be found, as at least implied, if not directly stated, in this post.
In my "All or Nothing!?" post, which preceded this one, by design, it was intentionally focused specifically on how our political conversations have trended over recent years. I do not personally believe that mindset is in any way restricted, however, to just that topic.
It has seemingly bled over into our conversations about almost everything. Can we say there is a refining process involved with true freedom of expression? One in which various points of view are presented, when backed with genuine sincerity and good intentions, that lead to better outcomes?
I believe that to be so. And this post has been written, with that in mind.
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