Idk my bff crystal ball?

I am not well known for my clairvoyant abilities, but I would be glad to take a few stabs at what the future will hold, and what it will drop. Which theories will survive, with bits and pieces still intact to provide a moderate living for researchers and professors, which will crumble like the life of a World of Warcraft player, and finally, which will cling on to a semblance of validity, bouncing up and down in the academic limbo until some new comer finally puts it out of misery?

While scientific theories are rarely permanent, there are some that tend to last for a while before kicking the bucket. I believe that the Proteus Effect as supported by Yee and Bailenson’s research is yet to approach the bucket; in fact I think it will be a very long time before someone would approach it with any container of a cylindrical nature. As the virtual world grows more complex and become more reflective of reality, people will further adapt to their virtual persona, thus allowing their online personality to mirror closely to their avatar. The new generations of online games, for example, tend to allow more and more customization for the characters, so players would feel even more immersed in the virtual world and take on the expected behavior of their avatars. This naturally leads to the next phenomenon that will undoubted thrive in the future – online addiction. With the number of WoW users approaching the population of Sweden, it would not be absurd to claim that in time the trend of online gaming, will expand to even more Internet users. “Logging in” to a virtual world may become easier and even more accessible, fueling the addiction and people’s need for escape to a fantasy world, eventually abandoning their grim reality:

The Hyperpersonal Model, however, will not fare as well. As online interaction become more open and advanced, exchange done through CMC may very well reach the same intimacy offered by FtF. Even now we can communicate online using video conferencing, which greatly increases the number of cues offered through CMC. It is not out of the line to presume that future online communications will be so similar to face to face that people will no longer form different breadth/depth of impression in different media. Likewise, the Uncertainty Reduction Theory will no longer be relevant as future CMC interaction, with more available cues and detail, will not leave much uncertainty in the minds of the users. When the users finally leave virtuality, the modality switch won’t be apparent and thus there will not be an increase in attraction. On the other hand Impression Management Model (by O’Sullivan) will likely retain some usefulness for a period of time (stay in limbo), because it would take a long time before CMC can become as transparent as FtF, so people will still try to regulate their behavior to form specific impressions, however limited the control may be.

Some new issues and technologies that need to be addressed are: online addiction (as mentioned previously), privacy, and social networks. Privacy will be a significant concern. As more information becomes available online, people start to lose the veil of anonymity and may be threatened by all types of identity theft. Social networks will experience a large growth as a result of ubiquitous internet access and the ease of online interaction, but also face the problem of privacy loss due to the inherent lack of security in a virtual network (which may or may not be improved in the future).

While I personally thought that COMM 245 was very comprehensive and covered an interesting and wide array of subjects, I wish that we could have discussed more on the contemporarily political issues circling the virtual environment, for example, the controversy regarding government agencies demanding information from internet service providers and the fight over the legality of P2P programs and online gambling websites.