They are learning to live in virtual worlds, may find themselves alone as they navigate virtual oceans, unravel virtual mysteries, and engineer virtual skyscrapers, but increasingly others are there as well. New kinds of communities are spreading where members assume personae of their own creation and have fairly intimate relationships with people they may never physically meet. Julia is offended by Robyn's suggestion. Julia is indeed a robot, a program that resides in a computer in Pittsburgh, and is able to chat about hockey, keep track of player's whereabouts, and flirt - a common guest in virtual communities, where the traditional distance between people and machines has become harder to maintain. New computer interfaces model a way of understanding that depends on getting to know a computer through interacting with it, as one might get to know a person or explore a town.
People are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real.
Computer sciences use biological concepts, and human biology is recast in terms of deciphring a code. Computers alter our ways of thinking about ourselves and other people. A more fluid sense of self allows a greater capacity for acknowledging diversity. The voyager in virtuality can return to a real world better equipped to understand its artifices. In the emerging culture of simulation psychoanalytic ideas will become newly relevant.