"Real" Worlds: Virtual and Physical

A while back I heard Esther Dyson say something to the effect that one of the major movements in the next 5 years was going to be the emergence of our "online personas." She envisioned that someday soon we would all be busy managing our various "virtual identities" and leading "virtual lives" that complemented our "real" ones. In fact, she suggested that a tremendous paradigm shift would have to occur where we would no longer make a distinction between our "virtual" worlds and "real" worlds, opting instead to draw the distinction between our "virtual" worlds and our "physical" worlds, since they would both be equally "real."

Here's my personal data point to suggest that this paradigm shift has already occurred:

A couple of years ago, I had my first (and to date only) academic article published in an academic journal. The topic and journal are irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion, but if you're interested you can find it here (on page 167). What's important is that I wrote this article with two co-authors--one in Australia and one in Texas--who I never met or even spoke with in person. We met via an online community we all belonged to, we collaborated on the piece via email, we submitted our article to various journals via the Web, and we were accepted for publication via email. There is no doubt that the end result is clearly "real," since I even received a printed copy of the journal issue in which the article appeared. However, that item was really just a manifestation in my "physical" world of the work product generated COMPLETELY in my "virtual" world.

I would venture to guess that saying my experience is not unique would be a huge understatement.