[Web 2.0] - Future in a sandbox

I’ve allready brought up the bad things about the informationsharing properties of web 2.0. This post will be about the good stuff and where web 2.0 is heading...web 3.0 if you will. I read a rather interesting article the other day about web 2.0 heading. The author stated that the future of web 2.0 is allready here, albeit in it’s beta stage. He was talking about the sandbox portion of the MMO:games genre. These games have no perticular goal but to hang around and interact with other players. The world is created and controlled by the players, not the developers and the players are free to create whatever they want in the virtual universe. Games that fit into this description are for example Second Life, Project Entropia and even in some ways the HOME-feature on Playstation 3.

The author, who had spent a week in Second Life’s virtual world, motivated his claims with a number of reasons. He described these worlds as a graphical internet. Everyone is represented graphically by an avatar aswell as larger organisations and companies. Walking around in the world is like traversing the internet but in 3d. Want to visit a friends blog or homepage? Just go to his house and you can find it all there. This deepens the notion of the internet as a actual world and allows for interacting with other users in a more profound way. Ofcourse you can also log on to the “regular” internet from inside the game via virtual screens but the true experience comes from actually seeing pictures and videos as if you were still in your own home and not staring on a screen. Even watching a concert in the game as if you were in the crowd.

Another reason or crossreference to the concept of web 2.0 is the contribution of the users. In these sandbox games the users are the ones that add new content. Everything from museums to exploding panncakes (the authors invention) are created and the world boundries expands as users create new landmarks. Arcitecture classes, conferances, exhibitions and concerts, all are held inside the world. I truely believe that this will be the new internet, not just some passing trend. But how is this going to affect the rise of ethical issues in the future? I think this leap grants new ways of acting on ethical grounds. Protesting on the internet can take on a new form as users gather and protest with their avatars in front of the targets office in the game. I also believe people will be able to merge better with their online representation, taking their ethical values with them online to a much higher degree then normally.

This suddenly extends the ethical issues to a new level and even if this isn’t the future of web 2.0 I bet we will increasingly become more online than offline. We will develop more distinguished online personalities making us more fragile in a ethical perspective.