Resistance to Virtual Worlds

I am a big advocate of Virtual Worlds. I think that it is where the Web is eventually going to go.  Unfortunately, when I try to explain the future potential for Virtual Worlds to people, I encounter a lot of resistance. In this post I am going to restate some points from previous posts and see how they apply to the resistance against virtual worlds.

First, technologies that appear to be essential elements of our modern world faced resistance when they were new. The resistance to the telephone was no different that resistance to Virtual Worlds. Both we new and different in their time and difficult to understand.

Second, people tend to evaluate an emerging technology in terms of the world into which it is emerging rather than the world of the future that it will create. People think of Virtual Worlds in terms of the current physical world. In the physical world we have many adaptions to our physical presence which would not work in a Virtual World. So, people raise these issues as challenges. You cannot hug people. You cannot see their faces and so forth. However, to see the folly of this reasoning, just reverse it. Imagine that we all lived in Virtual Worlds and somebody suggested that we should meet people face to face. Just think of the resistance that you create. You might get germs from other people. Big people will take advantage of little people. People may just you based upon your looks and so forth.

Third, no matter how compelling an argument may be against a technology being accepted (consider the engineering argument against the telephone) unpredictable things may occur which make what originally appeared to be infeasible in the present, feasible in the future. Who is to say that the technology won't advance enough at some point and the fidelity increases to where you can actually read faces and body language. There are other more compelling arguments against Virtual Worlds such as how do you keep everyone from talking at once or how do you keep too many people from invading the same space. But, even these arguments evaporate in the face of realistic advanced in technology.

Fourth, people who resist new technologies simply because they are new and different will always bring out what I call 'the talking points'. These are points that are meant to comfort people who feel threatened by new things and are not serious barriers to the acceptance of new technologies. The real barrier to Virtual Worlds at the moment is not the resistance talking points but the lack of applications. When applications such as support for remote meetings, distance education or virtual tourism become mainstream all the resistance points will be forgotten.

Can We Learn Anything From the Telephone?

I intended to write an entry each Friday but I have gotten way behind. Life can get hectic at times especially at the end of the semester. So, despite the lapse in time, I wanted to wrap up the thread I was developing for the telephone by summarizing what we can learn from it.

First, technologies that appear to be essential elements of our modern world faced resistance when they were new. So, before we reject emerging technologies we must allow for the fact that they as well might become essential technologies of the future. This is far from a certainty. But it is also far from an impossibility.

Second, people tend to evaluate an emerging technology in terms of the world into which it is emerging rather than the world of the future that it will create. If we want to fairly evaluate new technologies we need to consider their potential impacts on our world and daily lives. Then we need to evaluate them in the context of those impacts.

Third, no matter how compelling an argument may be against a technology being accepted (consider the engineering argument against the telephone) unpredictable things may occur which make what originally appeared to be infeasible in the present, feasible in the future. The telegraph relied on nonexistence battery technology, a technological barrier that was eventually over come. I can recall a conversation I had years ago with a colleague who presenting a compelling engineering argument as why streaming video would never be possible. And yet, Netflix is doing very well with it.

Fourth, people who resist new technologies simply because they are new and different will always bring out what I call 'the talking points'. These are points that are meant to comfort people who feel threatened by new things and are not serious barriers to the acceptance of new technologies.

There are numerous emerging information technologies that are battling or will battle acceptance. There are virtual worlds, video games, intelligent web interfaces, analytics and big data, and artificial life to name a few. There has also been a note or two in the press about holograms and drone delivery of packages. So, there is much to talk about, many patterns to identify, and some tentative conclusions to be drawn.