August 12th, 2007
Terra Nova offered a very insightful post today pointing out some of the most significant fallacies that surround much of the current thinking regarding virtual worlds. In a nutshell:
“…If the ascendance of the Web and especially the changes brought by Web 2.0 sites, applications, and tools show us anything, they show us that the view of the Web as a singular thing is a mistaken continuation of an older centralized view. It also leads to the imposition of a set of inapplicable geographical constraints: information isn’t about place, and the Web doesn’t have a geography. We call this collection of online sites “the Web†for historical reasons, but it’s not really a web; it’s not even a unified thing like the virtual planet envisioned by Stephenson. Linking two html “pages†(another construct of convenience) does not create any form of geographical proximity. The Web may in fact be the least Euclidean, spatial, geographical construct ever made by humans.
Centralization isn’t the future; flexible decentralization is. Rather than trying to force-fit the Web into a Pangaea-like singular Metaverse (a huge sphere handed down from on high by the central authority of the ACM in Stephenson’s fictional world), we would do better to consider the future of many distributed worlds, some large and some small, some interactive 3D and some read-only 2D, and how they might combine into a mosaic of independent but potentially interrelated items, sites, and places.”
Flexible decentralization … a terrific way to think about virtual worlds.
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
