I recently created an avatar on secondlife.com, a virtual world where avatars can connect with each other. My avatar was named justfourfun (don’t hate, justforfun and just4fun were taken). I know that virtual worlds are a big deal to some people. It seems strange to me. From the little that I experienced, the people in this world seem to be talking about routine things like who was at the door and what their dogs were doing. I understand that there are many people who are homebound for one reason or another, and these people need outside communication and entertainment (one can only watch so much Jerry Springer), but I felt that there are many more productive ways to use time online, and that these false realities remove people from reality and thrust them into fiction.
I did a little research, and I found a helpful article on time.com that discusses how peoples interactions in virtual worlds actually affect their confidence in the real world. This is something I can get behind. While I have never been shy myself, my brother was painfully shy as a child. If there were an outlet where he could work though this shyness he probably would have had more friends in high school (don’t tell him I said that). To that extent, I believe that these virtual worlds are helpful, however, I am still not convinced that getting out of the house and being thrust into the world might not be more helpful.