2nd Life cont.

1) The real world and World obviously have a distinction present and that is the boundaries between reality and a fictional world. In World, you can visit a place virtually anywhere, and even in someone's mind that they have made up. Places that you can explore are areas from a movie or a comic book as well such as Gotham City. This is impossible to do in the real world, so World makes that possible. Certainly the ability to fly around is not the same as the real world as well. The society differs in many ways, but the main part is that, you can be whatever your mind wants you to be. World is really just a fictional world and it could be possible to get mixed up in this fake world from the real world.

2) I would say meeting in World was a lot more frustrating that meeting on BB vista or using a standard email or AIM client. I would much prefer email/text rather than meeting on World. Our group met physically for World and we did it side by side in the library, and even then we struggled because of the poor server status, we constantly lost the network and found it very frustrating to even meet together for a meaningless couple minutes. I would never use World again. Then again, maybe it was just the libraries computers and connection that was terrible. That was just our groups experience with it.

3) The concept behind World is there, and I believe it could be a useful teaching tool because you can explore areas of interesting where you don't actually have to go to. For example, say you're learning about the Great Wall of China, the teacher could take the class there in World and explore it. However, many technically issues such as connecting to the server and such, make that hard to do and they need to be resolved first.

4) Both the arts and society play a role in World. Obviously society because this is a social tool and it changes the way society interacts. People can actually meet up and communicate without going anywhere, and it is as close to physically being there as possible. The arts is part of this because people can actually use their imagination to create new worlds and explore, and that entirely is a new "art" of its own.