Virtual or Real?

Dear Mr. Bloomfield,

I found your piece, Virtual Worlds for Studying Real World Business, quite interesting. In this reading, you talk about the many ways and reasons people are using virtual worlds and  finding new uses for it. Some times people fail to realize that virtual worlds are very similar to real worlds but the biggest difference is the fact that people feel more comfortable with doing things online than in real life. I mean just take a second and think about the amount of information that people willingly give up on these sites like Facebook and Twitter. That right there shows the power of virtual worlds.

I think that it is great that people are discovering all of these new ways to use these technologies especially in the education field. Educators can easily have people learn things by actually doing them in these worlds and possibly have some fun without them thinking that it is an actual lesson. I'm actually going through it myself as I type this letter. Another great use that is coming to the surface is business using these sites for meeting among other things. These uses in itself saves costs and makes business people be much more productive than they ever could have been 30 years ago. I think that with the in depth studies going into these virtual worlds we are going to find many more uses.

I think that it is important that we study virtual worlds because it is just like anything else that we study, we need to know all of the pros and cons that come with what we are creating. I think that it would be completely dumb for people not study these worlds. Just look at the studies that have been done and what has come from them and how we are using these worlds now. It truly is amazing. When conducting these studies I think that its is important to know what exactly we are looking into and for what. If we don't know these things we can get misunderstood findings and attribute them to the wrong things and that is not good. When we get our findings, i think that it is important that we understand what the findings can do and the impact of them especially anything regarding technology. Technology is moving so fast. If information that can have a huge impact gets out in the wrong way or if the wrong conclusion is drawn things could go bad and bad things can happen. So simply in studying virtual worlds is like anything else, we need to be careful and know what we are dealing with.

Best,
Amir Zaffa