Friday, April 29, 2011

Disruptive Technologies: Second Life

Thornburg (2009) aptly explained that disruptive technologies are a completely new type of tool that changes how things are done, but they are not gradual extensions of the older type of technologies. Recently Second Life was considered a disruptive technology because it interferes with the way people interact with each other on the internet. In Second Life, people create avatars that represent who they are or who they want to be (alter egos) in order to set up relationships in the virtual world.


If this new world is a disruptive technology, it would replace how and where people go to meet others on the Internet. Instead of using chat rooms or having to interact with people on a face-to-face level, people now have the ability to create a new world and develop characters for how they want to be seen in their virtual environment.

Since disruptive technologies seem to come out of nowhere and make an existing technology obsolete, I am not quite sure it will totally replace how we can interact with others. Second Life, has been around for several years, but I do not see it being replace with another innovation within the next 5 years. I do see it being used more in education because in certain situations it can be an effective tool for learning. By using virtual worlds, teachers and students can travel to worlds and access information that we cannot obtain in face-to-face environments.

Laureate Education, Inc. (2009). Emerging and future technology. Baltimore: Author.

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