You walk the grid. You meet the people. You speak to them. You get to know them. A bit. Fine.
Time passes. Time passes faster in this world than in the other one, you know that. It is not that the Sun comes up three times in 24 hours, it's that things are changing faster here. And those people from the first sentence (and you too) are changing rapidly. You meet … no, wait… that was me…
I met the guy, couple of months ago. Nice. We did some talk, we did that friendship ritual. We rarely met after, but we exchanged IM's every now and then. That's how I learned that he became a dog. Metamorphoses. Nice.
I saw him in that shape, all right. But, in my head I kept the image of a human, broad shoulders, funny hair. Lives go on. Then, I got an IM I could only stare to, wondering what the fuck he is thinking he is talking to who! Something about lot of saliva, my face, licking… crazy stuff. Not even making much sense. You cannot slap somebody's face over the IM. So, just ignore it.
Time passes, lives go on… IM again. Now, I don't know if that one was offensive, or if it even made some sense, but I did my share of evil-speak. We met couple of days later to sort things out. I TP'ed him, and before I knew a huge husky threw me on the ground, wiggling his tail and licking my face! That's what big dogs do when they are happy to see you. Oh, he made me laugh. Dogs and humans. And he made my clothes full of his fur, but he's a big crazy dog, all right.
Yes, I know I'll have to care about his fur, to cuddle him and feed him when we meet. Yes, I did apologized sincerely for all the nasty words I said. How the hell I was supposed to know that it is husky, not a human typing me an IM?
This world lacks many things. But the one we miss the most, the one that is most dangerous, is the lack of communication we are expecting to have. We don't have body language, we don't change our face expressions while we speak, for many of us there is no variations in voice. When we IM in the meatspace, we communicate with humans. And those humans are not changing their look, lifestyle, gender or specie every now and then. When we speak in meatspace, we look in the other person and that person see where we look at. Here, we move our cameras all the time, and nobody except us doesn't know where we look at. And if we look in that person's eyes, what do they say? They say "nice texture".
Too many times it happened that somebody say a joke but got misunderstood because the smiley in the next line came to late. It is crazy that some RP sims are against LOL's and emoticons insisting in the full emoting sentence. For example:
dandellion Kimban: LOL
is wrong. Instead, you have to use
dandellion Kimban laughs out loud.
Mind you, laughing is something that comes instantly, that is not to be suppressed until one types twelve more letters. It is not natural. Maybe it doesn't look nice and literate, but those short and automatic finger gestures are something that goes automatically while my human is laughing somewhere in the parallel dimension behind my back.
I doubt there is technology that will solve this. It seems that we'll have to adopt, that we'll have to learn new ways to tell things, to communicate all the variations in meanings of our words. How long it would take? Who knows. Hopefully less than it will take for the whole system to collapse or to become unusable because of it.
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