Editing Mesh (section)

= Mesh Uses =
There are many reasons people use the mesh. The foremost is communication: voice and video calls (typically displaying avatars rather than actual video), electronic messaging (e-mail, instant messaging, microblogging), and file and data transfers. Socializing is also key, handled via social and reputation networks, personal profiles, lifelogging, chats and conferences (both AR and VR), and discussion groups and forums. Information gathering is also at the top, whether its browsing the popular Solarchive or other databases and directories, tapping the latest newsfeeds, browsing mesh sites, tracking your friends, taking lessons in VR, or looking up just about anything conceivable. Recreation rounds out the pack, covering everything from gaming (AR and VR) to experiencing other people’s lives (XP) to VR tourism and club-hopping.

== Personal Area Networks ==
Since everything a person carries is meshed, most people maintain personal area networks that route all of these devices through their mesh inserts or ecto, which acts as a hub. This is both a security measure, ensuring they maintain control over their own accessories, and a convenience factor, as it focuses all of the controls in one place.

== Virtual Private Networks ==
Virtual private networks (VPNs) are communications networks tunneled through the mesh, which are dedicated for a specific group of people. The primary use of VPNs is to create privacy and security for its users, and so they typically use security features such as ego authentication and public key encryption. VPNs are regularly used to mesh mobile offices into a corporate network or mesh people together who work on or contribute a certain project.
Other VPNs—particularly social networks and rep networks—operate with minimal security features, simply serving as a network of specific users within the mesh and making it easier to keep in touch, transfer information, make updates, and so on. Most VPNs come as specialized software suites that run custom environmental software that integrates into the user’s normal mesh interface and AR.

== Social Networks ==
Social networks are the fabric of the mesh, weaving people together. They are the means by which most people keep in contact with their friends, colleagues, and allies, as well as current events, the latest trends, new memes, and other developments in shared interests. They are an exceptionally useful tool for online research, getting favors, and meeting new people. In some cases, they are useful for reaching or mobilizing masses of people (as often illustrated by anarchists and pranksters). There are thousands of social networks, each serving different cultural and professional interests and niches. Most social networks allow users to feature a public profile to the entire mesh and a private profile that only those close to them can access.
Reputation plays a vital part in social networks, serving as a measure of each person’s social capital. Each person’s reputation score is available for lookup, along with any commentary posted by people who favored or disfavored them and rebuttals by the user. Many people automate their reputation interactions, instructing their muse to automatically ping someone with a good review after a positive action and to likewise provide negative feedback to people with whom the interaction went poorly.

== Mobile Offices ==
Due to the lack of office space and the wireless accessibility of most information, most businesses now operate virtually, with few or no fixed offices or even assets. Instead, individuals have become their own mobile office. Bit-pushers and bureaucrats like hypercorp executives, clerical workers, accountants, and researchers—as well as innovators like artists, writers, engineers, and designers—work wherever they want to.
The most prominent example of this phenomenon are the bankers of the Solaris hypercorp. Each employee acts as a mobile one-person banking office, managing transactions via Solaris’s robust VPN.
On rare occasions, office environments are run in simulspace with time dilation to maximize efficiency. Since this requires the workers to access a centralized wired network and leave their bodies unattended while accessing simulspace, however, it requires an extra level of physical security that is typical only of some governmental installations and corporate habitats.