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Growing up virtual
August 09, 2007
From my column in today's Guardian:
Compared to Club Penguin, Second Life, the much-hyped virtual world aimed at adults, is something of a ghost town. It's managed to attract only about 95,000 paid subscribers so far, a fraction of Club Penguin’s 700,000. In fact, all of the most popular virtual worlds are geared to kids and teenagers. The venerable Habbo Hotel, originally launched in Finland in 2000, attracts 7 million visitors a month, Sweden’s Stardoll attracts 5 million, Webkinz and Neopets attract 4 million each, and Gaia Online reports nearly 3 million monthly visitors ... Clearly, there are big commercial rewards to be had by enticing children to spend a lot of time exploring virtual worlds. What’s less clear, though, is the long-term effect on the kids themselves.
Read.
Advertisement: Coming this spring: Nicholas Carr's new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Preorder now from Amazon.
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Nick's next book:
Nick's latest book:
"Future Shock for the web-apps era" -Fast Company
"Ominously prescient" -Kirkus Reviews
"Riveting stuff" -New York Post
Greatest hits
Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians
The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock's avatar
Flight of the wingless coffin fly
Other writing
The end of corporate computing
Nick's first book:
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