EXABYTES by Debashish Chakrabarty

To some people, let’s just call them gamers, the world consists of bits and bytes. The virtual reality merges with the real world – if there even is such a thing as a real world, of course. It's easy to lose yourself in a virtual world, to inhabit and become the characters and avatars present on the screen in front of you. It’s a case of oversensitive empathy, throwing your mind forward into a simulated other, feeling and sensing what that small construct of pixels and polygons does, as though they are part of your own physical self.
If they were here with us, they would tell us about how they surf the alleyways of dreams and fantasies, of passion and fashion. In a split second, they would leave us again, reentering the world of bytes where their real lives play out.

This year it is estimated that a total of 966,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information will travel across the globe via the Internet, that is 966 Exabyte's of data. Such an awesome quantity of information has never existed before, and it all exists as the result of people communicating via virtual networks. Gradually digitizing and leaving traces of themselves on a simulacrum of reality.