I have always admired Caleb Booker’s in …

I have always admired Caleb Booker’s insights like this exquisite blog post discussing The Anatomy of an Avatar. He particularly caused me to revisit an issue I thought I had settled for myself, text v.s. voice chat. As I reflect back, I remembered some important realities about my virtuality.

By far the deepest, most real relationships ever fostered in my experience in Second Life where founded on voice. In fact, voice became the means of fun times when wife and I and our friends would attend virtual social events and have so much fun talking to other while our hands were busy with virtual surfboard waves, hang-gliders, bouncy balls, or poking through profiles as we whispered about people over our private line. I miss those times. It has been a while. I think it is because I have been in OpenSim regions so much these days and none of them have voice enabled, yet. It will definitely be a good thing. Although I suppose I could use skype, it just doesn’t come as naturally as selecting ‘voice chat’ with an avatar.

However, one of my most rewarding relationships, professionally and personally, has been purely text via chat and blogs. I imagine this is much like some of the more recognized correspondence relationships I have read of in the 1900s.

At the end of the virtual day, my relationship is deeper with those who I have spoken with as well as IMed. Voice not only creates huge efficiencies in virtual collaboration, it is just more natural for more people.