Mixed Realities

I think that this and other examples illustrate quite well a quote I read recently by Richard Purcell (former chief privacy officer at Microsoft) stating that "Technology is way ahead of our ability as a society to think about the consequences"

On a related note (everything is related, I know) an article in the Washington Post about the recent annual Toy Fair in NY, dated February 20, 2008; p.C01 says:

Fact: Kids create more than 100,000 avatars each day in virtual communities such as Habbo and Club Penguin. That startling statistic has broad implications for how kids play and what the $22 billion toy industry wants to sell them to play with.

...For the (toy) industry, which uses this four-day play date to hawk its current and upcoming products, here's the best-case scenario: Kids won't want to stop playing in their online worlds. With the ever-expanding child obesity problem, that also is the worst-case scenario.

Of course, worst-case scenarios make for some of the best business opportunities (e.g. 9/11). That is why you see and will see more and more, a strong linkage from RL to VR as you already have with toys such as Build-a-Bear which uses the virtual world, where children play a controlled fantasy using an avatar of their toy bear, to model their consumer behavior (and their parent's) therefore bouncing back to RL where the child now sees his/her bear as lacking those things which they so easily get online.

More worrying to me is the fact that those kids forfeit their imaginary role and fantasy playing by succumbing to a pre-canned experience. This might have implications for the development of true free-form creativity in the child. And no matter how emphatically the toy companies insist their "privacy policy" protects your children, the fact is that kids activities online are closely monitored by those same companies, so that while individual privacy might be moderately protected (very weakly I would argue) their group as a whole becomes a very vulnerable and exploited target.