Google attempts to save marriages around the world

Sometimes even the best product creators have to accept that their inventions may have negative effects far beyond their entertainment value.

So, perhaps, deeply evangelical and conservative supporters everywhere will be raising hallelujahs aloft at the news that Google is closing down Lively, its virtual world experience.

Naturally the company has offered the usual public speaking about concentrating on other businesses and accepting that not every bet will work out.

However, there may be a deeper and more moral core to this decision.

Surely no one has been left unmoved by the Second Life divorce scandal.

Here we had a wife of solid virtue discovering that her husband had entered into a seamy and torrid virtual affair on Second Life (or should that be IN Second Life?).

Will this man now return to a chaste married life?

(Credit: CC Bryngfors)

This was a fantasy entanglement between Modesty McDonnell, who looked as if sleaze was a cloud she could not ascend to in a helicopter and Dave Barmy, a man of strange physical proportions and hair that would not have looked out of place on the head of a Brussels drag queen.

Yes, these were mere avatars, but the distress their relationship appears to have caused Dave's First Life wife, Amy Taylor, led to First Life strife and divorce.

(It also led to Dave and Modesty, whose First Life names are Linda Brinkley and David Pollard to become engaged without ever having met. But who could claim this is the Real Thing?)

The timing of Google's announcement to close Lively is, therefore, suspiciously adjacent to news of Dave and Modesty's immodest cataclysm.

And it seems to me that Google has decided that the world (the First World, that is) has changed. The company seems to be suggesting that becoming someone entirely different in a Second World is a socially divisive minefield.

A Lively World, it appears, can be deadly to our fundamental social structures. It will be interesting to see whether divorce rates decline in the aftermath of this brave and good-hearted closure.

[Mikebanks]

It's all been done before, like so many other things in the days that we were on the way to the Web. Women and men were catching their significant others in hot chats with online sex objects in the early 1980s. The venues were CompuServe and similar online services that provided realtime chat services. And I use "sex objects" because what else can you call an animated construct and words you can't touch? (I dunno ... it is half sex video.)

Anyway, divorces have been inspired by online sex for over 25 years now. Either someone gets caught, or the typing whizzes decide to run off together. The only difference is who is the first to realize there's going to be a divorce.

And, oh man--think how difficult online sex was back in those days! Uphill both ways, and all you had were typed words on a monochrome screen. Imagination was important. Literacy was important, although at the penultimate point literacy was often weakened by fading concentration and a switch to single-handed typing.
--Mike still On the Way to the Web

[play7]

But second life is another story mikebanks..Its full of guys endlessly cheating on their real life wives.....Thank about it Mike......One can sit behind a computer rub one off and be happy, and the husband or wife would never know. Besides VR sex is just plain STUPID........Why have sex in a VR with pixels people where real life is far more full fillsum.........

[Mikebanks]

Yes, they are cheating, and real-life is more fulfillng. I think many of these guys are doing it online because they think they won't get caught as easily as if they were doing it in real life. But people don't realize how furtive they may appear while doing something "private" in front of a computer screen doing something private. And they may be fooling the woman online, too.

What about the women? Some of them are really men. I wonder how what percentage of women who participate are doing this for entertainment, and perhaps cheating.
--Mike