What’s real?
I read The Real-Town Murders around the same time last year. It is set in England in the near future, or at least partly so, because it also features Shine, “the immersive successor to the internet” into which people are happily plugged in.
More recently, in “Why is this interesting?“, I learnt of Roblox, apparently used by three-fourths of all 9- to 12-year-old kids in the United States at the moment. It’s more than a gaming platform, it is a single digital location that now offers all her old activities: playground, schoolyard, theater, and mall all in one. Thanks to the pandemic, and the digitisation that it has fast tracked, an entire generation might have a different definition of “real”. In the real world of adults, gaming is on a tear, and many reports claim that AR and VR are on the cusp of massive adoption. To note that Snapchat is the king among social networks for a particular generation.