Newt… Not!
This short video of Newt Gingrich’s appearance in Second Life shows him effectively deflecting a question that he was asked. He thinks that “companies” (specifically IBM) should be the one’s answering the question “How can we make metaverses like Second Life more appealing to employers as suitable locations for telecommuting activities?”
He calls for the creation of a “working group” made up of a number of companies and organizations to work on how to expand the ability of other companies, the public, and the GOVERNMENT to work in “places like Second Life”.
Like nobody else is doing that in SL… and what the heck is a “paraverse“? Did he just make that up? I’m sure he meant to say “metaverse”, but oh well. As of right now, there’s no definition of the word, but I’m sure some schmuck will make one up, soon.
Malignant Narcissist @ September 30, 2007
I hadn’t heard the term “paraverse” before either, but fortunately, through the use of a web site called “Google” I found out what he’s referring to. See: http://reference.info.com/reference?qkw=Paraverse&source_id=2222&source_key=Paraverse
Paraverse refers to a special case of a metaverse that is constructed specifically to mirror the real world, in parallel with it, therefore “paraverse”. This is what David Gelernter has been talking about for a long time as “mirror worlds” (see http://tinyurl.com/22ovnf from 1992) and what projects such as EOLUS are starting to enable now (see http://tinyurl.com/25stes ).
Thank you for finding that. As you can see, I looked on Wikipedia and there wasn’t an entry for Paraverse.
In my opinion (according to your description) I don’t think Second Life qualifies as a “Paraverse”. It does not mirror the real world in parallel. There might be some things within SL but the world of SL, as a whole, does not.