I skurffed a random essay through Blogdex about Los Angeles and the way it is depicted in various media. The author in particular talks about the abstracted representation of Los Angeles in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and how strange it is to have been to a real place and find it recreated in a video game. I imagine the emotional impact is quite different than if one had grown up in L.A., where one becomes naturally trained to appreciate the gradations between "real-real," "fake-real," "real-fake," and "fake-fake." (Or maybe it's just me.) I tend to assume that the rest of the world tends to simply dichotomize experiences between "real" and "fake," since that seems to be the most useful distinction.

Anyway, it got me imagining a merger between geocaching and virtual reality, where, in cyberspace, there is a near 1:1 construct of the real world, where your movements in the real world are completely mirrored by the movements of your avatar in the Matrix-like world. For example, say I'm going down Hollywood Boulevard in the real world. Say that once I got to the intersection of Hollywood and Highland, I decide to log in to cyberspace. In cyberspace, I'll still be at the intersection of Hollywood and Highland, but instead of the monstrous megamall that stands at that intersection, there is instead, oh, a space elevator. Or some other structure that is easy to program in cyberspace but essentially impossible to create in the real world. So you would have these two symbiotic paradigms: the real world, and a meta digital world, which would for the most part remain identical except for some magnificent modifications.