Social Parallels to the Web - Circa 1995

Within the span of one week I have given out my avatar's name to two real life friends. I remember when I first started giving out e-mail addresses and getting blank looks in return. It reminds me of the mid-90's when I would explain the glories of the web and e-mail to people who were not yet in the loop. "Ok, so there is this thing on the computer you see and the computers can talk to each other over a phone line through this thing called a mod...." Well, you get the idea.

Heaven forbid I meet with these people in real life. That is way too time consuming and personal. Nevertheless, its so hard to explain what Second Life is to non-users. The learning curve is tremendous. Currently only one of my two grandmothers understand my real life profession as a web developer. I tried to explain Second Life to her and that was one paradyne shift too many. If you didn't understand the movie the Matrix, then you aren't going to understand Second Life.

I see the growth of the web as this major learning curve that grew for a while and then leveled out into a nice steady plateau. Sure there are newbies to the web everyday, but the web is not the uncharted, no-rules, wild west frontier it once was. Of the pool of web users who are now savvy, there is an even smaller group of Second Lifers. We are on the road over a much steeper learning curve. There are less of us, we are more computer savvy, and the interface and rules are still developing. The interface is richer, and is not two-dimensional like the web. There is a lot of "gray space" to be filled by user created content.

What are your thoughts about the parallels and differences between the web and the metaverse? When will the metaverse plateau? Will the emergence of a hollodeck-like environment lead people to drop the web and then Second Life like a hot potato?