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I absolutely loved reading “The Vocabulary of Comics”. Everything that it said was completely true but I would never actually think of it on my own. I enjoyed reading the brutal honesty of how humans are so wrapped up in themselves all the time that they somehow manage to see themselves in everything even though we don’t actually see ourselves that often. I had actually been talking to my mom a few weeks ago about how my brother’s girlfriend was homecoming queen. When she won, my mom said that she could hear some people asking each other who Kim even was. My mom then proceeded to go on and on about how teenagers are so self-absorbed and narrow minded that they never bother to get to know people outside of their little “cliques”. I don’t think that is just teenagers though. I think that is everyone. People are too afraid to go out on a limb and meet new people. Thousands of insecurities seem to pop up out of no where when we are introduced to new people. We wonder if they like us or what they think of our clothes and the way we speak. Even the most confident people worry about what others think.
Insecurities may be what drives people to hide behind their computers and get so obsessed with a second life and creating avatars. It’s a whole different world where you can be a completely different person. People get so wrapped up in what they want to be instead of accepting who they really are. Their second life becomes more important than their real lives and they focus on cultivating relationships that way instead. It can’t be healthy for people to hide themselves that way. They need to put themselves out there in their real lives so that they can take chances and have real relationships instead of ones that are based solely on a false image of what they want to be.
N(LIFE) > or < IRL?
Where N represents any real number greater than 1, and IRL means In Real Life.
Is 2nd life — or 3rd or 4th — or any other virtual life experience greater or less than real life?
Did everyone see NBC’s “The Office” last night? In last night’s episode we find that Dwight Schrute, falling deeper and deeper into depression, has turned to Second Life to escape reality:
Seeking further detachment, Dwight goes on to 2nd Second Life.
While this seems comical, a disturbing trend that has been an underlying theme for virtual existences since their inception has been thrust into the spotlight on national tv: virtual existences are inherently fantasy. And in this fantasy world, users are free to enact their deepest desires, usually free of consequence. This phenomenon, coupled with the rapid growth of the virtual world, brings us to an age-old question-
Are humans inherently evil?
While this has been debated since humans first learned to debate, new avenues of expression such as virtual worlds are giving humans the freedom to express themselves in as raw a means as they feel obliged.
In “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society” , Julian Dibbel tells the tragic story of a digital rape.
The article was published in 1993, and in the near 15 years since, virtual worlds have grown in usage and also in user freedoms exponentially. With the means to act in any way one chooses, the virtual world has become a mirror image of the true nature of the human being. The user interacts in the virtual environment free of other stimuli, such as laws or any other construct of “IRL”. This, along with the “fantasy” aspect — where users are delving into the virtual world to escape reality — has allowed the desires of humans to run rampant in the form of avatars. While not all desires and fantasies are of an evil nature, any realm where the inner mind is allowed to see its every whim acted out in an existence guided by no laws or code of morals — no conscience — will most likely be a realm mimicking the darker side of humanity.
Users choose to exist in these virtual worlds because the freedoms inherent in them are greater than those IRL. But does that leave us with N(LIFE) > IRL?
Are the consequences, the effects, of a virtual action existing only in cyber-space? Not according to the victims in Dibbel’s piece. And with the astronomical increase in all aspects of virtual worlds since 1993, one can only wonder when any ill effects will begin to show within the population as a whole.
While the math may soon change, the answer for the present is clearly IRL > N(LIFE)
Kate and the Fab Four 
