Reality vs. r34|17y

written 21 Nov 2006 in the earliest morning

I’ve been reading alot of comments about the real world and what it is. Namely, most folk consider the real world to be the one where corner stores made of bricks, mortar and foreign clerks sell cigarettes and cappuccino drink to physical human beings, all on their ways to work in actual buildings via their steel and rubber and fiberglass cars, while the virtual world is the one that sits inside of tiny pieces of silicon and is little more than a series of 1s and 0s formed into ten billion blogs and gambling websites.

The History of the Virtual World

I can’t help but wonder over early man, living in caves, hunting for mammoths, fucking for procreation alone, in his early days, first confronted by a wandering Cro magnon wearing jewelry, communicating through a more complex language, and possibly living in tents. Then, reality would have been an almost animal-like state, existing to survive, where these new comers had improved their technology to give them extra time to live in a fantasy world – one where clam shells twined together with animal tendons at times took precedence over building a fire.

Or Dark Ages man, dying of plagues and famine, sickly in his muddy existence, encountered by Rennaissance people, with their paintings of themselves, time for carving exact likenesses of the human form out of marble or painting God reaching out to Adam on massive Sistine ceilings.

In either case, reality was being subverted from the normal to a less tangible, less immediately relative experience. As today we have our Internet, television, cell phones and all of the interbreeding those devices do these days. At first the Internet wasn’t much more than a collection of Dungeons and Dragons Player Character Sheets and chat rooms where people called eachother Mexicans in an attempt to be witty or pretended to be women to fool all of the other people pretending to be women.

My Modern Conundrum

Today, on this 21st morning of the month of November in the two-thousand sixth year of our Lord, I find myself paying all of my bills online, banking there, shopping there, doing the majority of my communication, professional and personal, there. Since I’m not just playing games and chatting with underage girls in hopes of avoiding my zit-covered, awkward teenage body, it is very real. In fact, I do more of the things that I need to do on the Internet, and find myself doing more of the things that I want to do – playtime – in the real world.

So at what point does the Internet become my real world and the streets around my house the virtual world I go for enjoyment, primarily? I suppose the answer was “sometime late last year.”

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  • Nice job. I started off reading, thinking I probably wasn’t going to agree with every point you made, and now find myself at the end realising that was a futile idea.

    I remember the first time the Internet became my real world and not just a playground around the exact same time I earned my bread and butter from it.

    - Ms. Wakame | 02:03pm 21 Nov 06
  • well, the fantasy world of a cro magnon and his pretty jewelry became the real world of the merchant selling jewelry for food.

    our fantasy world’s of enjoyment will always become one of our real worlds of bartering (if we aren’t making) because there’s profit to be made in what we enjoy, and profit takes care of our needs.

    the real world of having babies and acquiring nutrients will never go away.

    but the point of your post was the virtual world becoming the place you make profit and the non-virtual world becoming where you find enjoyment (and not really fantasy/enjoyment vs. real/sex-food). this can be answered because you are older and can buy beer

    haha, anyway, another kick-ass post! a real brain-thinker

    - chad | 08:02pm 21 Nov 06
  • Right! That was my point exactly, at how the fantasy world of jewelry and artistic thought became the reality of human existance via trade-making.

    Olivia’s point was so there as well, that once she realized that she could make $$ from the “virtual world” it became a reality beyond a passtime.

    The very fact that I make my living on the Internet, I met my girlfriend there, and basically “hang out” with my friends more there than I do on my stoop, that makes it real. And it’s only becoming more and more so.

    - nathan | 11:19am 22 Nov 06

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