mindmatters.
Byline: TRYSTWILLIAMSI'M GLIDING effortlessly down our road. Past the faceless disembodied figure in white perched on the street corner, and the car with five wheels stuck for eternity in the middle of the carriageway. Then round the block and past the eerie white spectre again, the image so brittle you can almost see the individual pixels shiver as you fly past.
I'd forgotten quite how mesmerising Google's Street View site is, allowing you to zoom through the haunts of childhood or "walk" around a frozen moment in the life of your community.
And then it hits me. What if, all along our road - empty in real time - there are other families similarly huddled around these images on their Macs and PCs? A community of online ghosts joining together in a virtual world street jamboree unimaginable in the harsh glare of (real) daylight.
We do so much in our virtual worlds these days. "For Sale" signs go up on the street and rather than simply talk to a neighbour or put a clandestine call to an estate agent under the guise of an interested buyer, you can just do a quick bit of Googling for the asking price and, eventually, the sale price too.
With the advent of the likes of Street View, the vision of a "virtual" second world, as envisaged by cyberpunk author William Gibson a generation ago, seems to be reaching fruition.
It's a long way from the days when Alta Vista and Yahoo ruled the search engine roost in an online world dominated by poorly designed personal web pages and sites whose pictures took so long to load they justified the "www - world wide wait" tag.
Die-hard webheads insist today's online advances are a gateway to a new kind of community, opening up a world of friendship and information that stretches beyond the confines of local geography and traditional social norms. Critics suggest the opposite: the death of real-world community. Another example of screen-based activities having an antisocial effect on future generations.
With Only this week there was the usual hand-wringing over figures claiming Welsh advent the likes children are the UK's biggest telly addicts, fuelling concerns about obesity.
of Street View,
But it's never so pat. There can and should still be room for TV, the internet and sports and physical activity in a child's life - they're not mutually exclusive. Painting TV as a soul-sucking goggle-box helps no-one.
vision "virtual" second
At best, it's a valuable learning tool, as vital in educating beyond traditional boundaries of knowledge as the internet. At worst, it can still be a valuable form of social glue, promoting commonality, shared experience and shared values.
world seems be reaching
Those of a certain age can share in the nostalgic glow - pointless nonetheless - of memories of Mr Benn, Jamie and the Magic Torch, Battle of the Planets and the more obscure delights of Chorlton and the Wheelies and Handful of Songs. Uneducational mind-rotting chewing-gum for the eyes? Probably. But it was my generation's chewing-gum for the eyes.
fruition
The growing freedoms and multiplicity of our TV and online worlds are just the latest time-honoured clarion call for the need for parental moderation. As I'm sure Street View's pale spectre will agree - whoever he or she is.
[email protected] the advent of the likes of Street View, the vision of a "virtual" second world seems to be reaching fruition
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