This weeks lesson has been virtual worlds. These worlds allow users to create connections with users who they may have never meet and users who create a new identity for themselves. When stumbling around on my virtual world, I began to draw connections to my new standard social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. While I know the majority of my Facebook friends in real life, I follow plenty of Twitter handles of people I have never (and properly never will). Some of the handles like @drunkhulk are of imaginary characters. While celebrities tweet in character and are only a few shades away from being imaginary.

Twitter encourages interactions not only person to person but person to institution or president to people. These interactions couldn’t happen outside of the sphere of social media. This impossibility creates it’s own virtual world, where peasants can talk to kings and people can masquerade under a different twitter handle. I was recently messaged by @stealthmountian who has over 267,000 tweets to their name. All of which are correcting others for incorrectly spelling “sneak peak”. This might not be my ideal way to spend my free time but, I can appreciate that twitter provides a platform for doing so.

This isn’t to say that Twitter can’t create severe real world consequences. Tech blogger Adria Richards, made international headlines today  when she was fired for posting a photo of two men on Twitter who she claimed were making sexist remarks. It appears we can be anyone we wish on Twitter. Even the subject of international media attention.