Comments on: Google attempts to save marriages around the world

Google is shutting down its Second Life rival site, Lively. Will this have a positive effect on the institution of marriage?

[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