Virtual Life Can Be A Solution To Stay Healthy In Your Real Life

Earlier this week I received an email from a web conferencing startup Mikogo - I have reviewed them on Profy and found their approach to enabling us have virtual meetings right on Skype to be quite a fresh one (as I am a big fan of Skype). In the email they suggested that now that the swine flu threat is here we should choose web-based meetings over real-life ones by using their application.

So I realized that some of the tools we sometimes avoid using are actually here to help us avoid swine flu - even if they are not that widely popular now, we may all have to change our lifestyles now and virtual tools may be just the right solution for many. In fact, various desktop and online applications offer us quite a number of ways not to get infected by doing one simple thing: staying at home and avoiding in-person meetings that can be potentially dangerous.

In fact, it looks like if we truly live to the expectations of the web 2.0 concept proponents, the mankind will be immune to pandemics: simply because we will spend all our time on our own without really communicating with anyone in the real world. The receipt here is very simple and obvious: wash your hands, stay at home, avoid people, and do all your work from behind your computer screen. The tools that will hopefully be appreciated at this challenging time are quite ovious.

For example, Skype has been a longtime supporter of the idea that people should spend less time travelling and replace at least some part of their business trips by air with video calls instead. Skype’s main reasoning has always been that such an approach is environmentally friendly as we won’t cause extra air pollution choosing video talks over real handshakes. And though only a while back I argued that no video call will be a good substitute to a real face-to-face meeting, now Skype team seems to have yet another reason to support this approach: you will certainly not get infected by your companion when you both sit behind your computer screens - probably thousands of miles apart.

Any presentation that you may need to give to a customer or a partner - be it in a nearby building or overseas - can easily be replaced with a virtual meeting using conferencing tools like GoToMeeting, Webex or the above-mentioned Mikogo. Such desktop sharing tools will let you further reduce the unnecessary traveling and exposure to the infection.

And it’s not only about business as you obviously leave your house or apartment for various purposes - and job-related things are only one part of them. It is well-known that cash can accumulate all the viruses in existence and it will distribute such viruses easily - unless you wash hands every time you touch a note or a coin. And of course the technology world offers plenty of tools to avoid this particular danger - using online payment processors and online shopping are two solid solutions for you to avoid additional contacts with humans when doing the traditional real-life shopping and also avoiding touching cash entirely.

In addition to working and covering your basic requirements staying at home and avoiding leaving the safety of your home, internet offers plenty of tools for entertainment as well - like watching movies on Hulu instead of going to a theater and listening to music on Last.fm instead of attending concerts and night clubs. The only popular entertainment tool that you should probably still avoid is online dating as if you actually meet someone you will want to meet in real life, chances are you will have to go to a restaurant and who knows what it will mean for you eventually in terms of potential infection.

In fact, I believe many companies will now offer various alternatives to the usual things that we will probably need to change our lifestyles now that we are under such a terrible threat and are looking for additional protection measures. So it is no wonder companies will be offering more and more tools for us to live healthier restricted lives.

In fact, some examples are already here: in Hong Kong teachers and students are encouraged to use the UniServity Learning Platform for the students to be able to learn online from homes instead of attending schools and colleges - using all the modern collaborations tools like blogs and wikis in the educational process.

I believe it is quite obvious there will be getting more and more solutions like these ones developed to help people do as much work and learning from home as possible - because even if this particular virus is won over, there will probably be new ones to arrive - so now and then we will feel the need to stay at home instead of meeting people and traveling again. But I have my doubts about the prospects of such a life - it may be good to stay at home for a week or two but replacing all the real-life things with virtual ones will hardly be the right solution to enjoy our lives.