Although Internet-based, virtual worlds can be viewed as entities that are quite distinct from the Internet, particularly in their characteristics and effects. Virtual worlds offer communities, access to information, and long-distance communications that seem, at first glance, quite similar to the offerings of the World Wide Web. However, the distinctive feature of Virtual Worlds is the manner in which they produce, and allow their users to produce complex networks and relationships for the purposes of community-building, communications, and knowledge-sharing.

Virtual Worlds then, are a medium in and of themselves. Their relation to the Internet is not unlike an automobile’s relation to the highway, which acts merely as a conduit for travel and exploration. The role that the Internet plays, as it relates to Virtual Worlds, is that of infrastructure. It is the means by which users are able to create, manipulate, and share knowledge in an audio-visual environment.  As a relatively new medium, Virtual Worlds have gone largely unnoticed in the larger media landscape, but it would be wise to investigate their intricacies by way of Marshall McLuhan’s Tetradic model.

Marshall McLuhan wrote that: “The content of a new medium is always an older medium.” What he meant by this is that new media must always reflect the content of preceding media. As in the case of radio, which largely made use of theatre, literature, news coverage, and other existing media for its content. The television too, utilized the audio content of radio and the visual content of cinema to create a new experience, and also a new culture. The Internet can be viewed as an amalgamation of all of its preceding media, it combines visual, audio, and print in new and robust combinations. The Virtual World, like the Internet, necessarily combines all preceding forms of media, and therefore takes on the characteristics of each.

Let us look closely at the human functions that McLuhan suggests must necessarily be enhanced by new media, in this case, Virtual Worlds. Virtual Worlds enhance human community and collaboration by offering a new space that is conducive to human networking. Users are able to gather in groups, in residential “islands” where they have (usually) like-minded neighbors. Each island is a world onto itself, with populations of various nationalities and backgrounds.

Virtual Worlds also enhance our sense of an online presence. Even prior to the advent of the Virtual World, each individual who regularly used various aspects of the internet, had consciously or unconsciously, crafted an online persona, an online presence. Between the various logins at message boards, chat-rooms and other online communities and the internet handles that individuals became associated with there arose a unified personal representation of that individual in cyberspace. Virtual Worlds are an extension and enhancement of this online persona in that they render with it the concrete physical features of sex and ethnicity. Virtual Worlds gather the disparate elements of an ‘ online persona, the logins and internet handles, they give them the option of choosing a name, a physically representative avatar and a geographically-based location for that avatar (within the virtual world).

This leads me to the next point on McLuhan’s tetrad, that of retrieval. McLuhan believed that each new medium retrieves and revives something from human history that may have been lost or confused. As an example, the radio may be thought of as a medium that revived the ancient onus on orality and the spoken word. Virtual Worlds act in a similar sense, they retrieve conversation in the form of in-world voice communication, something that is primarily lacking in the World Wide Web. Likewise, they retrieve the age-old concept of tribalism, the act of belonging to a small community with shared interests and goals. In today’s information vortex it is refreshing to find a space where one is among a small group of like-minded individuals.  Furthermore, acts of communal building are another example of an activity or practice that is slowly disappearing in modern western culture. We no longer build our communities, rarely do we have much control over the environmental conditions within which we must function. In Virtual Worlds, the users and inhabitants of residential islands take a direct approach in the creation of their own environment, it is not forced upon them. Largely, the environments within which individuals decide to operate are a direct reflection of their beliefs, their activities and their community, a practice which has gone out of style in modern society some years ago.

The third point on McLuhan’s triad deals with what a new medium obsolesces. A new medium makes certain preceding media, and more commonly, certain aspects of preceding media obsolete. For example, the Internet has, in many ways, made travel and interpersonal interaction obsolete, in certain circumstances. Whereas before, a flight or other travel arrangement was necessary to meet with prospective business partners, with the telephone we can connect directly via teleconference. As a medium that is predominantly based on communications, Virtual Worlds are threatening towards the Internet’s capabilities for communication, such as: e-mail, chat rooms, bulletin boards, voice chat, video chat, etc. Virtual Worlds are still a nascent media, they have not yet become entrenched in the collective subconscious. Therefore, it would be negligent to suggest that Virtual Worlds have usurped the technologies that power the Internet. However, it is clear that even in this early stage Virtual Worlds are competing with browser-based communications technologies. 

The last point on McLuhan’s Tetradic model is that of Reversal. McLuhan believed that all media, once it is extensively used and abused, has the potential to reverse, or flip. We see evidence of this in the “dark side of the Internet,” the various illegal and immoral offerings of the Internet that are the products of an abused medium. Virtual Worlds are not exempt from this concept, they too have the power to reverse their beneficial characteristics of mass communications and community creation. Virtual Worlds, when pushed to the maximum, may become plagued by harassment (verbal, sexual) and by immorality in much the same way as the Internet. Further, there is the threat that individuals may become so absorbed in their avatar and in their “virtual life” that they neglect their duties and responsibility in the real world.