Blog Post #10: Digitized Lives chapters 1 & 3

The part that I found most interesting about this reading was the concept of cyberspace, and a virtual world/real-world divide.

When a person is asked to imagine a place, like a city for example, there are a lot of mental geographic images that pop up. However, if one was asked to imagine cyberspace as a place, it's definitely more of an abstract concept to the average person. The only kinds of people who would be able to have any grasp of what it really does look like physically in terms of servers, routers and switches are engineers. "The geography of the internet is three things at once: the place from which the user is accessing it, the user's experiences online in that space, and a largely invisible space of connected servers, data centers and individual computers that enable the experience."

I think it goes without saying that there is definitely not a divide between the virtual world and the real world, at least in most cases. They are very much intertwined. A prime example is the way in which real life events can (and often are) tweeted, made into a status, or posted as a picture or a video. This can also happen the other way around, where people can have real life conversations based on a conversation they had online or some other online event they both partook in. The virtual world is always a reflection of the real world. Of course 'reflections' can vary, and this is not to say that online mirrors real life exactly.

In fact, the book brings up a good point by saying that the terms 'real world' and 'virtual world' are somewhat misleading because nothing can exist solely in the virtual world. This is because we are always somewhere in the real world, even if we are immersed in whatever device it is we use to access the virtual world. It's just easy for us to think of them as two separate worlds, especially given the degree to which we can get immersed in things such as video games and virtual reality simulators. However, I think referring to these two things separately does help when it comes down to studying/analyzing them.