Virtual life

I am not sure if we need to make a blog entry for this week or not but I am going to do one anyway.
I thought that I could go without ever talking about these virtual avatar sites, but I guess not. There is a scary digital world out there and we are all getting caught up in it. More and more people are spending more time and money on-line and virtual websites such as second-life are all making this happen. We live in such a complex world today, and digital images of ourselves on-line are the next step forward. The most interesting part about the virtual sites that our class logged into was that there is a whole on-line community that holds discussions of legal topics and people can interact in all of them. This is creating a different type of learning environment for everyone and could potentially generate on-line classes for universities. As the professor said, "There might not be any more excuses for sick days anymore with classes that can be held strictly on-line" where you must be logged on in order to show proof that you were "there". These websites are gaining more interest from the younger generations and I can only wonder what this will mean for the future.
A downside that is among us everywhere and in this case there is no way for people to monitor who people really are in a digital form. They may say that they are twelve years old, when in fact they could be forty. This creates legal questions of privacy and identity theft problems as well as a whole slew of parental concerns for their children. I can only hope that this will somehow be weeded out of the systems or that the sites do not gain enough popularity to maintain a digital second-life.
This may be my last entry for the semester but I must say that the whole blogging experience has been very enlightening and I may maintain this blog for further conversations. I have never had a blog before and this has been a lot of fun taking about and learning about on-line worlds.