Reality and Virtuality

When we had our recent news release , not everyone was
thrilled. And some of these folks had good points. Here are
a couple of the responses to the above release: Dvice, Latesht.

We first need to look at the problem: learning another culture
by becoming familiar with the knowledge of that culture as
well as becoming sensitive to the culture. There will always
be controversy given a culture, and we are capturing some of this
in our Tibetan Sky Oracle (under development to be manifested
in Second Life toward the end of the year).

As far as cultural knowledge, real-life encounters are the
ultimate goal, but there are problems: the majority of folks need
money to travel to China and then even once you travel, there
are things you cannot do in reality: role-playing someone else
to better learn the language or culture, or obtaining contextualized
information as you do with web linking (the iPhone gets you
partway there). Also, once there, you may have to travel
extensively to find everything you can experience in a technology
such as Second Life.

A key thing to remember is that technologies, whether they are
the web or Second Life, are not replacements for real-world
experiences. They only augment our experiences to make up
for problems such as lack of resources. We should take advantage
of all possible routes to learning other cultures and use technologies
to reduce costs and in situations where real-world encounters may
be difficult.