World of Warcraft is not just a game, but a platform for self-expression. As a player, you have the freedom to explore different aspects of your personality and even learn new skills. With dozens of different guilds to join and thousands of players to talk to, WoW provides endless networking, collaborating, and working opportunities.
Personally, I use WoW to explore and experience management and leadership. In the game, there are many guilds to join or create, each with its own set of rules and hierarchy. I take this opportunity to learn how to manage and lead, honing my skills and gaining new experiences.
Additionally, I use WoW to experience a different side of money or resource allocation, becoming extremely wealthy within the game and creating giveaways or sponsorships. This not only helps me learn about managing finances and resources but also allows me to give back to the WoW community.
Another way I use WoW as a platform for self-expression is by experiencing learning and teaching. In the game, there are always things to explore or learn, and there are many players to work with or help. I take this opportunity to teach others, sharing my knowledge and experiences, and in turn, learn from them.
These are just a few examples of how WoW can be used as a platform for self-expression. Whether you want to be exactly who you are in real life or take a chance to explore a different part of yourself, WoW provides players with the freedom to express themselves in a safe and enjoyable environment.
Expressing oneself in a virtual world like World of Warcraft is not only essential to the gaming experience but also to personal growth and development. The freedom to explore different aspects of oneself and learn new skills makes WoW a unique and rewarding experience. So, the next time you log in to WoW, take some time to explore the many ways you can express yourself and see how it enhances your gaming experience.
It’s easy to claim the life we live is surrounded by distractions. There’s more stimulus than ever, with technology competing for our attention day and night. It’s not unusual for us to grab our phones first and last thing each day, as we go to and get out of bed. Some argue blue light addiction is what is killing us all. I even wrote about The Digital Divide previously, and how we’ve become farther the more connected we’ve become.
There are pros and cons to everything. The benefits of technology are obvious, allowing us luxuries such as globalism, the internet, social media, smart-technology, and more. We’re on the cusp of incredible technology as well, with nascent developments in artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, supercomputers, and more. The obvious downsides of technology are described in aspects such as the digital divide, technology addiction, and old knowledge becoming obsolete.
There’s a much deeper issue than just the pros and cons of technology: it is our cultural behavior and acceptance towards technology. We’ve seen tech companies rise, spawn, and compete with each other for what ideas and apps are valuable and to manifest what they believe to be important to us. We’ve seen pushback from audiences asking for those who grew in prominence to hold more responsibility. As our culture adapts and accepts new avenues, new laws and regulations are placed upon them.
That’s easy to see from the conglomerates point of view. But what about the people using the technology day to day? How have we become affected outside of the direct benefits?
I’ve previously written about the change in our dialogue, and how generations before the internet have different conversation skills with those after the internet; the same goes for smartphones. Communication is just one avenue.
Another is our forecasting of the future. As technology transforms more rapidly in front of our eyes, the amount of lifetimes it requires to see dramatic change reduces. When it once took several generations to go from ocean travel to sky travel, it’s taken remarkably less time to go to space travel. The same goes for our ability to communicate. When it used to be one village, it then went to one country, and now we can speak to anyone in the world quickly.
Rapid changes to developing industries is not a new demon. There’s always been early adapters of technology and there’s always been schools or groups dedicated to honing crafts by any means, including forward-facing technology. Yet as technology grows faster and faster, these changes are harder to implement. In my college days, professors could not teach the most current material but they would at least acknowledge its existence. It was difficult for just a few professors to quickly change the pipeline of education, so no matter how fast technology grew or changed, the academics would be lagging behind, struggling to catch up.
There in lies the most uncertain future we’ve ever seen. I graduated college 10 years ago and life is only changing more quickly. It is true some things never change. Yet it is also true that what works today may not work tomorrow. We’ve seen megacompanies fall to the wayside by refusing to grow with the digital era and we’ve seen companies that are less than 10, 20 years old become the wealthiest and most powerful companies ever. It is already taking less than one generation’s lifetime to see our lives change more than our parents could expect. Soon, it’ll change faster than the current generation can expect. From there, how can we be certain of any future?
Distraction comes from the Latin roots of “dis” meaning apart, and “trahere” to drag. We are dragged apart from our duties when we are distracted. Yet what are our duties if the future is uncertain? All the stimulus we react to may not actually be such a distraction. In times of survival, when our lives were most uncertain, hyper-attention to any stimulus may be the only thing saving us from a tiger in the jungle. The anxieties was face today are boundless by society and boundless by arriving technology. Is it all a distraction? Or are we just trying to survive?
I first heard the term phone world from a book called Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari. I’m fascinated by modern dating and would say I’ve spent more time than the average person thinking about and spending time on dating apps.
But this post isn’t about dating. Rather, it’s about how we’ve become farther from each other despite becoming more connected.
We’ve all been in the presence of a phone party. There’s multiple people standing around, sitting around, but there’s nothing happening. Everyone is plugged into their phone, engrossed in their phone world. This isn’t a new phenomenon, as we’ve seen commuters ignore each other since the dawn of commuting.
This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned the term phone world. It’s one of the primary forces of loneliness in our Western world. Unlike distractions of the past, our phones persist with us throughout our lives, spanning several years of time now. Contacts, photos, and social media have created an inseparable bond between us and our phones, allowing us to always return to our comfortable world whenever we desire.
The ability to always return home is one of our first metaverse abilities. It is the ability to center or ground ourselves in digital space and reliably express ourselves. Unfortunately until our phone worlds connect, that is the end of our current state of the metaverse and it is why the best way to socially enjoy a phone party is to stand next to each and show each other what each individual phone is displaying.
Until we have the ability to enjoy an in-person live experience of our phones connecting, they will primarily be seen as a force of escape. Escape is necessary, but to have it be the only option seems disappointing. As technology develops, our connections with each other should slowly adopt a more in-person touch. We can see this from looking up directions on our PCs and printing out MapQuest, to using digital maps, to using live data, to soon asking AI.
Conceptually, it is easier to refine processes like looking up directions than it is to counter-disrupt what our phones have done to our social exchanges. Our phones and apps do try to talk to each other, and they’ll become better at it over time. The question is, do we try to talk to each other, and will we become better at it as our technology divides us?
The Chinese Room is a famous thought experiment in which a slip of paper written in Chinese is handed to a mysterious machine or room. Within this room or machine, are systems which interpret the Chinese into English. With an English translation, it formulates a response. This response is applied through the same systems to translate the English into Chinese characters. At the end of it all, the machine or room spits out a new slip of paper responding in Chinese.
While this sounds like a complex Rube Goldberg contraption, it really is a simple interpretation of a translation machine, written out as a thought experiment before technology could allow for said translation.
The point of the thought experiment is to ask the reader: does the Chinese room understand Chinese? In the thought experiment, there is an infinite and always accurate amount of translations the Chinese room can handle. But because it has to go through an interpretative process and is unable to directly communicate in Chinese, the Chinese room fails to meet the criteria of truly understanding the language. It must consistently rely on tools to interact with the language.
How does the Chinese Room apply to ourselves and our world outside of the analogy of language? Do we operate by reading symbols and characters, filing and sorting interpretations, and respond with said initial symbols and characters? I’d largely say yes, especially as we spend more time in digital spaces with computers and smartphones. Interpretation of spaces and boundaries, expression with colloquialisms or memes, and societal expectations have shifted our language and the tools we use to express ourselves.
This is most easily observed with the pre-Internet generation interacting with the post-Internet generation. The ability to communicate on a meaningful level has changed, not because of the nature of English or whatever common language is shared. Rather our ability to navigate and interact with spaces has dramatically changed. From the globalization of our supermarkets to the globalization of social interaction, our expectations and habits have dramatically shifted and continue to rapidly evolve. The younger generation is quick to adapt and older generations or those who fail to adapt will have a harder time communicating with those who do.
In the Wikipedia article of the Chinese Room, the applied ethics section covers remote military operations and the morality of taking actions upon interpreted data.
The Chinese Room has an intense implication of the Turing Test and determining whether something is human. The question of authenticity or consciousness is a popular existential problem for artificial intelligence. However, the reflection or internal observation of the Chinese Room with ourselves helps us examine what we are becoming as we integrate with technology and how we respond socially to others as our world evolves. The question of does AI truly understand could be inversed to do humans truly live?
Leadership, Design, Writing 