Future
According to K Zero, a virtual world consultancy service, there are over 1 billion (1,009,000,000) people worldwide registered in virtual worlds today.
"Things change and develop so fast," Nergiz Kern, an English language educator inside Second Life, told IOL. "But I think virtual worlds will become as normal as the internet is now. Most people who are online will have an avatar and use VW for all kinds of activities from meeting and chatting with friends to learning and doing business."
Wasko, Teigland, Leidner, & Jarvenpaa question how virtual worlds will affect our traditional economic and governance models and argue that firms, governments and leaders should pay attention to their development as they may lead to a "mobility" of labor that may impact national and organizational competitiveness in a way similar to the way that first the mobility of goods and then the mobility of labor impacted competitiveness.
Read more about this topic: Virtual World
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“If nations always moved from one set of furnished rooms to another—and always into a better set—things might be easier, but the trouble is that there is no one to prepare the new rooms. The future is worse than the ocean—there is nothing there. It will be what men and circumstances make it.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal. It expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values.... Because myth anchors the present in the past it is a sociological charter for a future society which is an exact replica of the present one.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)
“I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)