Mundane indeed
One of the fellow members of my writers' circle wrote an excellent short story (that really should have been a novella) about the future, in which people met in cyberspace, for reasons that I will not spoil by divulging. In her story, her characters refer to their physical bodies as "mundane". The use of "mundane" as the opposite to "virtual" struck me as a wonderful and appropriate use of language. Just a reminder: mundane means...
Lacking interest or excitement; dull
Of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual one
Of, relating to, or denoting the branch of astrology that deals with political, social, economic, and geophysical events and processes
The use of the word is perfect across all of these meanings. I read a review of the movie Inception -- a quick google fails to find it -- that mentioned that the shared dream state in the movie is remarkably similar to the virtual world experience. Seeing my teenagers "jack in" to World of Warcraft does indeed seem rather similar to seeing the characters in the movie connect to a shared dream.
As I write this post, my younger son is playing World of Warcraft with a number of his friends. He is wearing a headset and talking to them via Skype while they work co-operatively in the "game". In the virtual world, his primary loyalty is to the guild, as is his friends', and they are working together, immersed in the physics, but particularly the economics, of their shared hallucination. When they switch off, they will be back in a world where they are just kids, it's raining and there's nothing on telly. Mundane indeed.
Following my friend's brilliant insight, I shall stop using the word "real" and from now on will only refer to the mundane world as the "opposite" of the virtual world. They're both "real".
In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen megabytes... [posted with ecto]