#onlinesupportgroups

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnUztQc3TTA

There were television shows and movies that showed what the future could be like with the increasing advancement of technology. I admit, I believed that we would be hovercrafting to work in the future, dress ourselves using funky gadgets, own robot butlers and maids to cook and clean... Life would be easy and human beings would have control over all of it! I wasn’t the only one who thought that this would happen. 20 years seemed so long and within those 20 years, there was a belief that we would have the technology to do anything we wanted to do. There was no limitation to the creative juices that flowed in each and every one of us. The possibilities were endless and we could create a utopia, or an ideal world where boundaries no longer existed. 

The perfect world. The perfect life. 

We created something that was close to doing just that. The Internet. A way to connect to billions of people where anything was possible. I remember those days when computers and the Internet were not a part of my life. I didn’t own a computer until around 2004 and I was content enough to play made-up games with my brother and watch Wheel of Fortune on the TV. The world seemed so small to me, like I was living in a bubble that I couldn’t escape. If I wanted to immerse myself in something different it would have been through books, movies, and my favourite Teletoon TV shows. If I didn’t know something, I would have had to ask someone rather than use a search engine. Now that I think about, I don’t know how I lived without the Internet! It seems like such a distant past but when I really think about it, it wasn’t that long ago. 

Rather than living in a virtual dream, we are merging virtual reality with real life experiences. Video chat applications like Google Hangout and Skype is a combination of the virtual and the real, social media happens in real-time, touch-screen maps are easily available for when you need it. This is something that Professor Beth Coleman would call, “X-Reality” where things can happen at the same time in the same place in reality and virtually. Many things that you need are located in real places and virtual places. Instead of separating virtual reality and reality, they co-exist together. The binary between online and offline is not as clear cut as it used to be.