Virtual Relations versus Real relations

A virtual world is an imaginary place synthesized inside a computer where individuals looking at the monitor can feel as if they are in a real world or a fantasy world. Today, the virtual worlds that people inhabit and where they interact are three dimensional graphical environments on the Internet. The residents are graphical avatars visible to each other. An avatar like Stone is the onscreen representation of a person in a virtual world. An individual user experiences tele-presence a sense of being present somewhere with other people and objects. People add what they need and want to the virtual environment by creating all sorts of objects such as other avatars, clothing, buildings, vehicles, landscapes, utensils, technological gadgets and objects dart. How can this be? The software that creates a virtual world simulates real-world physical rules such as gravity, topography, locomotion, real-time actions, and communication. Communication can include keyboard text, voice and other sounds, visible and audible gestures, graphics and icons, and a sense of touch and balance. Locomotion can include walking, riding, flying and teleporting. Avatars travel between buildings, towns, regions and even other worlds for education, business or leisure activities. Topography can include dry land, oceans, mountains, valleys, lakes, moons, planets and other forms limited only by the imagination. Social media We like to say human beings are social animals. We enjoy working together in communities or organized groups. A virtual world is a sophisticated high-level form of social media where a wide variety of social behaviors are on display. People interact with one another in a virtual world by networking their computer systems together and sharing the synthetic space. Virtual worlds are collaborative Internet spaces where in world residents create communities and interact on-screen via their 3D graphical avatar representatives. Multiple avatars appearing and acting together represent life and its social relationships. They act under direct control of the real-life persons behind the keyboards.

 Metaverse Neal Stephenson, in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, invented the words metaverse and avatar. The word metaverse joins the words "meta" and "universe. Stephenson described a metaverse as a fictional three-dimensional virtual world created inside internetworked computers where humans, represented on-screen by avatars, interact with each other in a non-physically-existing space that is a metaphor of the real world. Today there are more than 100 virtual worlds on the Internet. Most widely used is Second Life with more than 22 million residents (see also, below: Alternative Virtual Worlds). Virtual Life: the second world Second Life is a three-dimensional virtual-reality world developed by Linden Research, Inc. (a.k.a. Linden Lab), a San Francisco company, and born on the Internet in 2003. Its a social environment where people learn, work, earn, shop, explore and play together. Sociability: the second life Residents meet other residents, socialize, explore together, shop together, build things together, play together, participate in individual and group activities, undertake manufacturing and commercial wholesale and retail activities, create and trade their virtual property and services. Its also possible to get away from it all, to have time to reflect, to be alone while exploring and enjoying Second Life. It's very much like existing in real life (RL), but with the added ability to fly, teleport, create and do whatever you can imagine. It's best to remember that real people from RL are behind the keyboards when you interact with avatars in Second Life. They can and often do bring their own personal social, psychological and economic baggage into Second Life. Be just as alert to others in Second Life as you would be with other people in real life. Is it a game? Second Life is not a game. It does not have rules, points, scores, winners, losers, levels, an endstrategy, or most of the other characteristics of games. It is a semi-structured virtual environment where characters involve themselves in social networking activities for the purpose of personal empowerment and enjoyment.

 Do I need money to be a resident? The basic membership in SL is free. Most users are operating with free accounts. Registration is free. The viewer is free. The avatar is free. Time logged on is free, except for connection and usage fees you pay your Internet service provider. Most necessary goods such as changes of clothing, jewelry, skins, hair, cars, etc. can be obtained in-world for free. At the same time, a wide variety of goods and services also can be purchased. Jobs in Second Life In addition to purchasing linden dollars, you also could take a job in SL and be paid linden dollars for your work efforts. There are lots of ways to earn money in SL and new ways are being created every day. Here are a few: Unskilled jobs include dancer, model, shop attendant, greeter, bouncer and security agent. Employers are shops, clubs and dance halls. Skilled jobs requiring some knowledge and/or experience, and the ability to sell your services to others, include builder, modeler, texturer, scripter, animator, fashion clothing designer, architect, home builder, furniture designer, weaponeer, vehicle designer, event host, DJ, stand-up comedian, trivia event host, salesman, and many others. Think of what can you do in RL that you could do in SL? Freelancers are part-time news reporters and feature writers, broadcasters, disc jockeys, public relations and advertising professionals, lawyers, economists, counselors and therapists. Entertainers start nightclubs and festival parks and all sorts of performance venues. Professionals are full-time news reporters and feature writers who work for SL newspapers and magazines, broadcasters and disc jockeys who work for SL TV and radio stations, professionals in public relations and advertising who work for agencies and survey research firms, and lawyers, economists, counselors and therapists who run their own service firms in SL. Contractors hire themselves out to do work for other residents. Teachers teach someone something for money basic skills, intermediate skills, advanced skills, or how to build or script or get the most out of living inside SL. They teach either one-onone or else host an educational event, which instructs several residents about how to use Second Life.

 Shopping in Second Life Marketing is alive and well in SL. Shopping for any kind of goods you could imagine is one of the most frequently stated best features of SL. Therefore, as you might imagine, even a person with a free account still may feel a need for money to buy virtual stuff. Most any of the clothing, tools, vehicles or other objects that you might wish to acquire while you are in Second Life is likely to be readily available free. Freebie stores and warehouses are everywhere. Forms of Relationship In the virtual relation pattern we may get the following categories:

Internet chat Meet in person

Hve afair

Loneliness Me:vVrtual versus Real

Photograps

Telephones

Becoem engaged

Letters

Spped of developing intimacy

Figure: Relationship formation

The above discussion has shown us that the traditional forms of relationships are changing hased on technological development. And sometimes it is more important than that of the real ones. For instance, on facebook birthday notification of a friend of any corner of the world helps us to pra and or wish for him or her. It crates different forms of intimacy among us. Though it is not real but not less important than the real ones.

Changing Pattern of Nation-state in the Globalized world

As single phenomena, globalization has enjoyed immense attraction through out the world. Along with this globalization as process has tremendous impact on global economy, politics and society. In contrast most of the countries are receiving and consuming equal growth and opportunities of globalization (as some core countries of the West is getting). Therefore a huge number of resistance and movements are being observed since last few years/decades in developing countries. Scholars on the state and globalization contain three basic positions. The basic arguments of those theoretical positions are:

The state is victimized by globalization and loses significance.

Nothing much has changed and states basically keep doing what they have always done.

The state adapts and may even be transformed

Figure 1: Debates on globalization and nation state

Thereby ensuring that it remains the critical actor and does not decline. Critical support of each of these positions, partly because much of their difference hinges on interpretation. But not

withstanding its diversity, this scholar tends to share the assumption that the national and the global are mutually exclusive. Groups of enthusiastic advances To suggest that it is various groups of enthusiastic advances four main theses: First- Capitalism now, has become: Global Transnational Post-industrial Informational Consumerist Neoliberal Restructured Undermines nation-state and its microeconomic planning, collectivist welfare state, its citizens sense of collective identity, general caging of social life.

Second- New global limits, especially environmental and population threats, producing perhaps a new risk society have become too broad and too meaning to be handed by the nation-state. Third- Identity politics and new social movements is changing the society through the following processes: Cause
Use of new technology Increase the salience of diverse local and transnational identities The expense of both national and broad class identities which were traditionally handled by the national-state

Effect
Witnessing stirrings of a new transnational civil society Social movements for peace Human rights Environmental and social reform becoming global

(Michael Mann, p.1) Post- nuclearism undermines state sovereignty and hard geopolitics as Michael Mann noted.

 Socio-Spatial Networks The study on Michael Mann Has Globalization Ended the Rise and Rise of the Nation-state, it can roughly be distinguish five socio-spatial networks of social intervention in the world today. Those are as follows: 1. Local networks- Purposes just means substantial networks of interaction. 2. National networks- Structured or bounded by the nation-state. 3. International networks- Relations between nationally constituted networks. 4. Transnational networks- Passing right through national boundaries. 5. Global networks- Cover the world as a whole.

The Modest Nation-State of the North The regulatory process of such states expanded through several centuries. From the end of the Middle Ages, they are increasingly plausibly claimed a monopoly of judicial regulation and military force. Thereafter, in the 18th century they sponsored integrating communications infrastructures as a basic control of the poor. And finally, in the 20th century saw welfare states, microeconomic planning, and the mobilization of mass citizen nationalism. To a degree,

therefore northwesters become caged into national interaction networks, and these became supplemented by the international relations between nation-states, which we know by the term geopolitics. Handful of Fanatics The world today is very different. In recent decades far more people have been killed the civil wars, ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide than in conventional war between states. Even the relatively prosperous and orderly parts of the world what keeps people awake at night os less the threat of armed attack by another state than the fear of what might be done by a handful fanaticsperhaps armed only with box cutters like those who attacked the United States last September or even more frighteningly armed with weapons of mass distribution purchased in an arms bazaar that largely ignores State frontiers lost.

 The End of the nation-state? knichi Ohmae in his article entitled The End of the Nation State, puts simply in terms of real flows of economic activity, nation states have already lost their role as a meaningful units of participation in the global economy of todays borderless world. In the first place, these long established politically defined units much less to contribute and much less freedom to make contributions. The uncomfortable truth is that in terms of the glbal economy nation-states have become little more than bit actors. They may originally have been in their mercantilist phase, independent and powerful in wealth creation. Second- the nation-state is increasingly a nostalgic fiction. It makes even less sense today. For example, than it did a few years ago to speak of Italy or Russia or China as a single economic unit. Third- looking closely at the goods and services now produced and trade around the world as well as at the companies responsible for them, it is no easy matter to attach to them an accurate national level.

Conclusion Finally, when economic activity aggressively wears a national level these days that tag is usually present neither for the sake of accuracy nor out of concern for the economic well-being of individual consumer. The nation-state has changed its activities gradually. Some calls it as the fragile role of the state, while others regards it as the unchanged role of the nation state. Whatever it is, based on the above discussion we can easily say that the traditional roles of the nation state has changed its forms. It may be regarded as the evolution of the state performance.

Bibliography

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