A blogger's review of real life

I must admit that for the past couple of years, I've been an enthusiastic user of 'real life'. Although the real life technology is still backward, and has a number of flaws and glitches in the system, a growing number of bloggers are using it. Why, it seems like only yesterday that I ran into Armagnacd's 'actual' persona in the Melbourne botanical gardens. What a surprise that was!

Having an actual personality is, of course, one of the most difficult and challenging aspects of real life. It stands in sharp distinction to a blogger's ordinary practice of maintaining a number of different identities, sign-in names, joke personalities, and anonymities depending on which site they are visiting or using at the time. In 'real life', frequently, a person is required to make a statement and, astonishingly, stand by it! This couldn't be more different to blogs, obviously.

I'm still not quite sure what the attraction of real life is. I suppose real life is - well, it just is. Thankfully, the technology is becoming increasingly more accessible to bloggers, who can upload themselves into 'the world' with a few swift clicks of the mouse. This 'world' - the base for all operations in the real life technological platform - lies just beyond the computer screen, and is astonishingly varied and detailed. Many parts of the real life world now are almost as good, or at the least quite similar to, their blog equivalents! For instance, just the other day I participated in a real life functionality known as 'going down the street to get the papers'. Whereas previously we had to go to other websites to read about the news, all I had to do in real life was go to the newspaper agency.

There are still, regrettably, a number of deficiencies to real life technology. For instance, when I want to go down the streets in real life, or go to the shops, or go somewhere, I can't just hyperlink there - so the journey can take quite some time. And for the moment, real life is without a proper comments facility. I feel it would greatly enhance the usability of real life if people were able to type in comments while engaging in one of its functions.

On the other hand, unlike blogs, real life has 'morality', a new and exciting function that I feel has great potential to be developed more. Users of real life are expected to strictly conform to certain 'moral' notions. This is a great innovation, though I'm not sure where the innovation came from, exactly. Anyway, it's one of the principal attractions of real life, and helps to explain why an increasing number of bloggers are using it every day.

As an added attraction, currently, real life is not owned by any major corporation. Bill Gates has recently attempted to buy out the copyrights for real life, without success. (Though apparently sponsorship deals are being worked out with a number of major companies.)

Still, I wouldn't use real life all the time. The strain is just too much, and some of the functions are too primitive. But I can heartily recommend it for those who are just simply curious, or want to log off the computer for a while and wander around.

Real life: four stars out of five.