Wandering in Wonderland

I made it to my vantage point safe and sound after successfully escaping the collision with two students who were completely immersed into texting on their smartphones. Now, everything is peaceful. Well, not really. Groups of students are marching on from one place to another while sharing laughs and gossip. There are a few of them alone, but they are accompanied by the tunes flowing into their ears. Personally, I find it quite ironic that so many still believe we are far away from a migration to the virtual world, when we have replaced the sounds of nature with constant digital sounds, and the views that surround us with the photos from our friends’ social profiles.                                                               

However, it is clear that the cyberspace is not always bad for us - it depends on how one uses it. I believe this first year seminar helped me understand better what cyberspace really is and what lies behind it, and I am not referring here to the underlying code. Cyberspace has been shaped as we see it today as a result of our wishes and needs such as efficiency and permanent connectivity. It is amazing how I was able to do most of my research for the projects we had for this course online. Nevertheless, before taking this seminar, I would have taken it all for granted. I want to let myself be surprised more often by what cyberspace can offer. After all, it creates wonderlands for different people to simply have fun and take a break from reality. And who controls all these wonders? We want to believe that we have the power. However, perhaps the most important thing I have learnt is that there are moguls vying to control the switch to cyberspace. Am I afraid that someone will take over cyberspace and create a virtual reality to replace our actual reality? I do not know. I guess the novels I have read and the movie “The Matrix” just made me imagine possible scenarios. I still want to explore cyberspace, not simply label it as something scary and quit using it. Maybe the key is moderation or maybe the lack of ignorance.

It seems as if I have written down all my worries as well as my dreams. But I think as I advanced in this course, I realized there is much more to cyberspace than what I think. It made me realize I want open access to Internet, but there a lot more people out there who are eager on having a switch to restrict the access. There is something more than the apparent easiness of wandering through cyberspace.

I wonder if all these students running around would prefer to keep using all their flashy devices and keep their shallow connection to cyberspace… In the future it might be entertaining to use a virtual world in the course to get a better grasp of how these digital worlds function and what they could be used for. After Gibson’s consensual hallucinations and Anderson’s dumb universe, the direct experience with a digital world might be refreshing.