Reading report

Name: Cristina Soledad Guzmán
Date: August 29
Title: Avatars will soon outnumber humans
Source: www.guardian.co.uk Date of publication: Thursday August 23 2007

Vocabulary

Outnumber: 1. To be more numerous than.
Gartner:
Flagship: 1. A ship bearing the flag of a fleet or squadron commander. 2. The chief one of a group:
Gamble: 2. To take a risk in the hope of gaining an advantage.
Ensemble: 3. A group of musicians, singers, dancers, or actors who perform together.
Momentum: 1. The product of a body's mass and velocity. Also called linear momentum. 2. Impetus.
Grab: 3. To obtain or appropriate unscrupulously or illegally. 4. To take hurriedly.
Leap: 3. The act of leaping; jump. 4. An abrupt transition.
Upgrade: 1. To raise to a higher grade or standard.
ward off: 9. To avert, prevent: ward off disaster.
pervasive:existing in all parts of a place or thing; spreading gradually to affect all parts of a place or thing.

Main ideas

In four years` time 80% of internet users will hae avatars.
This will change society in a fascinating way.
Residents in Second Life come and go from this 3D world to anothers what has been causing financial troubles for this cyberworld.
The race to build a better virtual world is already in progress.
Second Life isn`t standing still and it regularly introduces new features.
Virtual worlds are a natural space for social networks.
This social networks will be more pervasive than reality t.v..

Personal reaction

Although this virtual worlds can be used by anybody al around the world, there are still many places where this technology is unknown or at least just a fes are making use of, so that I don`t agree with the future envisaged in this article.
Apart from that the fact that this virtual worlds have millions of users is not a key fact to think that people prefers living virtually to living in the real world, and a proof of this mistaken vision of the human behaviour is the current discussion about the addictive use of video games.
Videogaming caused great opposition among the adults that were worried of having their children hooked by this new technology some years ago, but scientific testing proved there were no proofs for such assumptions.
Due to this fact I dear to affirm that in what respect to the future consecuences and effects of the massive use of virtual worlds human behaviour is been underestimated.