On the empowerment of people in VR

The missing part of the equation regarding the exchange of information on the web is people. To be sure people post to Knowledge centers and retrieve from the same but these acts rarely involve another person. Essentially the world wide web is a huge warehouse of content but not necessarily knowledge.

knowledge noun
[S or U] understanding of or information about a subject which a person gets by experience or study, and which is either in a person's mind or known by people generally.

Knowledge is information applied by a person to a decision. Knowledge is, more often than not, acquired through relationships. It is the establishment of relationships that makes the transfer of knowledge person to person possible. The advent of Virtual Reality Environments, at long last, enables the use of relationships for transfer of knowledge.  More over it enables relationship formation by-passing formal introduction and the limits of distance.

The principle of the six degrees of separation (also referred to as the "Human Web") refers to the idea that if a person is one step away from each person they know, and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth.

Here is a classic example of how it worked:

A co-worker approached me a few years ago and asked if I knew what happening at the French Open now. He could find lots of web sites on what happened yesterday but not now. I entered ActiveWorlds and asked the question on a crowded GZ (Ground Zero aka arrival point). A person on the GZ contacted an acquaintance via email and shortly I received an answer in chat albeit in French from that acquaintance.  I activated Bablefish and entered conversation and data transfer with a man in Paris at the Open with a lap top attached to the French Television feed.

On the surface that is not too impressive. Consider the deeper implications. Using only one question I established a relationship with a person I never met.  He used an existing relationship with his acquaintance to allow me to establish a relationship with the Frenchman. In two degrees of separation I had data from the French Open not available to the general public and on an ephemeral link existing for only a few hours. In short the human web easily trumped the standard way of finding information by using a search engine. I would never have found this link with a search engine. Clearly, involving humans in the finding of information can allow knowledge to flow in torrents. When the transfer occurs in an information room wherein users can create and adjust link displays it is possible for virtual reality to generate a new phenomena – the information storm.