To a significant extent, the internet breaks down the barriers of real time and space. It expands our ability to roam and wander beyond our borders without budging from the privacy and security of our homes, schools or offices. (Hence, browser names such as Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Safari connote the sense of adventure surfing brings.) We can visit existing places without actually being there. While radio, TV, movies and other traditional mass media all offered this vicarious opportunity (and still do), the internet revolutionized it as we could now get to choose where to go and when we felt like it. We now had some control of what we want to experience through our very own personal pixellated window.

Computers and the internet also brought us new interactive worlds, realistic or fantastical. We can create avatars and “exist,” “live” or “die” in a digital universe, even one of our own making. (Students of Teacher Ygy’s Y2 class for Values Ed have immersed themselves in The Sims for their current project.)

(Users can become so engrossed in a digitally-simulated environment that they lose themselves in it. The line between the real and the virtual disappears. Not surprisingly, some game designers devote their lives to perfecting their creations, and for them, their real and virtual worlds merge.)

Internet and computer applications operate through a predominantly visual and audial medium, limiting our experience mostly to what our eyes and ears can perceive. Their technological pathways restrict feedback to our other senses (taste, touch, and smell). In contrast, print media like books and magazines have made efforts to engage our senses of touch and smell with perfumed strips and textured materials (for children’s books, we have Lift the Flap options and embedded swatches of cloth and other items). Of course, some interactive games, especially in video arcades (Dance Revo, first-person shootfests, race-car driving and sports sims) and now Nintendo’s Wii with its pointing and motion-sensing abilities, try to mimic a more physically faithful encounter, using mechanical (motor-driven) aids and more advanced gadgets like pressure-sensitive touchpads and remote controllers. However, simulation has (inherent) sensorial and physical limitations, including the following:

  • It works only for controlled environments.
  • 3D visual re-creation is more difficult to achieve than audio.
  • Other sensory feedback either doesn’t exist or cannot attain a level of realism or acceptability for temporarily suspending one’s disbelief.

To state the obvious, some real-life (and not-so-real) experiences cannot be replicated.

Nonetheless, if we see the internet as a means not of supplanting our real-world life, but of complementing or enhancing it, then the challenge should be to find those opportunities for doing so.

Imagine yourself in the year 2020, choose one of the following, and write an essay on what possible uses the internet could further offer.

  1. If I were a neuroscientist…
  2. If I were a professional football player…
  3. If I were an atheist…
  4. If I had a band…
  5. If I were an online game designer…
  6. If I were a magazine editor…
  7. If I were a nature conservationist…

Let’s make some common assumptions and describe them specifically (e.g., universal ultra-high speed internet access; projected or holographic avatars in sim-enabled areas; etc.).

Post your essay on the Y4 blog.

Deadline is Wednesday, 17 October 2007.