Virtually Reality

One of the buzz terms in the 80's was "virtual reality", where a user interacted with computer simulated environments to experience the surreal, an experience so immaculately developed that it was infinitesimally close to reality. People could land on Mars and Mercury, scale Mt. Everest on the treadmill, save the world from aliens and even rescue beautiful princesses from tyrants and marry them! (Yes, I am talking about Prince of Persia). The .com boom in the 90's saw the emergence of Amazon and eBay that opened up virtual malls and window shopping was soon replaced by browsing on deals2buy.com or xpbargains.com. The last 5 years the web has seen yet another development that could have a much more seminal impact than any of the phenomenons discussed above - "virtual communities". MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut and the like, have changed the way people interact with each other, something that was not tampered with since the big bang theory (or the days of Adam and Eve, depending on your perspective).

Virtual Communities are slowly becoming the primary way people interact with each other, be it chat rooms in Yahoo, IMs in Google or scraps in Orkut . Members of these communities create Avatars (yet another Sanskrit word sneaking into the English lexicon after Yoga and Karma), which are essentially virtual clones of the users, and interact with other avatars. Blogs are in the process of replacing newspapers as the dominant source of information exchange, so much so that newspaper sites share the same technology as blogs and news reporters are increasingly indistinguishable from bloggers. Even job search and career changes are done through professional networks via LinkedIn or Doostang. Wikipedia has become the go-to site for information on anything, from Paris Hilton to the Hilton in Paris, replacing the big fat volumes that used to adorn our bookshelves.

So, what is news? What is opinion? How do we filter the facts from the subjective analyses? Who are our friends - the profiles and avatars that exist in Orkut and MySpace or the homosapiens that reside in realms of reality. What happened to god old fashioned meet-and-greet or phone-chats. In short, what is real? What is virtual? Have we tampered so much with 0's and 1's that all there exists is virtual reality?