The title of this post comes from an article in The Weekend Australian of 15-16 September, 2007, in the Review section. It's on pages 4 and 5.
The article starts with, "The online worlds in which people play are rapidly reinventing media and entertainment, if not our concept of society, writes Peter Lalor"
So is he right, will the online world in all its permutations reinvent our concept of society?
The article quotes a suggested figure of 800 million people being registered members of an online computer game of some sort. Games are interactive and allow the players to engage, plan, and choose what they do, and be what they want, while being given "the power to defy geography, age, sex and the constraints of carbon-based molecules." Phew! Heady stuff! It's not all bad, either - the article quotes a father saying that one of his sons was forced to learn to read so that he could play his Nintendo.
Words such as intereactive, choosing, and being (ie not passive) could easily apply to all the Web 2.0 technologies - and they are so easy to use.
2 comments:
Thanks for pointing this one out Sue ( I know this is probably for your private consumption, but still...). I found this article when looking for references for my Second Life Librarianship paper for VALA on the weekend - I used the original PriceWaterhouseCoopers report it refers to, that mentions that worldwide the games industry will grow from $US31.6 billion in 2006 to $US48.9 billion in 2011. That's big!
I still feel a bit "out there" when I mention about gaming in a library context, but I think the change in interface and the fact that people enjoy and prefer this environment means we need to take notice of it. The equity issues for things like Second Life bug me - but then again equity issues for the World Wide Web used to bug me back in the early 90's.
HI Kathryn, the posts on this blog are not just for my private consumption - I've put them up as I feel that all the articles, documents, etc, could be interesting for other 23thingers. What I do like about this blog is the opportunity it gives me to keep track of all these interesting bits (and my reactions to them). Keeping paper copies, and then finding them again when I need them, is too hard.
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