lectura entregada

Cyberspace and the world we live in

Cyberspace is, for William Gibson, a consensual hallucination. Cyberspace is projected as the same kind of nowhere-somewhere. Nicole Stenger tells us we get there, but it has no location. Shrman and Phil Judkins truly the technology of miracles and dreams. Virtual reality allows us to play God: we can make water solid, and solid fluids; we can imbue inanimate objects with an intelligent life of their own. We can invent animals, singing textures, clever colors or fairies.

All this driven by a feverish belief in transcendence; a new technology will finally and truly deliver us from the limitations and the frustrations of this imperfect world. Howard Rheingold says we shall be able to rebuild the neighborhood community and the small-town public sphere and, in a world in which every citizen is networked to every other citizen, we can expand this ideal to the scale of the global village. Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling to form webs of personal relationship in cyberspace.

There is no alternative and more perfect future world of cyberspace and virtual reality. We are living in a real world, and we must recognize that it is indeed the case that we cannot make of it whatever we wish. We should make sense of them in terms of its social and political realities, and it is in this context that we must assess their significance.

Cyberspace and Self-identity

In the ultimate artificial reality, physical appearance will be completely composable. It would be instructive to see how changed physical attributes altered your interactions with other people. Not only might people treat you differently, but you might find yourself treating them differently as well. The exhilaration of virtual existence and experience comes from the sense of transcendence and liberation from the material and embodied world.

Electronic networks dissolve boundaries of identity. The visions are bereft, but the point is that the technology will, supposedly, let us experience them as if they were real. The new technology promises to deliver its user from the constraints and defeats of physical reality and the physical body. It provides the opportunity to go back and explore what might have been, if we had been able to sustain the infantile experience of power and infinite possibility. Virtual reality is, or is imagined as, a combination of the objectivity of the physical world with the unlimitidness and the uncensored content normally associated with dreams or imagination.

Continuing belief, of faith, in the essential unity and coherence of the personal self is held to be ideological, illusionary and nostalgic. In cyberspace, there are possibilities for exploring the complexities of self-identity, including the relation between mental space and the bodily other. We are provided with a virtual laboratory for analyzing the postmodern –and dissolved and deconstructed.

Claudia Springer says it involves transforming the self into something entirely new, combining technological with human identity. Virtual reality environments allow their users to choose their disguises and assume alternative identities. Cyberspace is imagined as a zone of unlimited freedom, a grid reference for free experimentation, an atmosphere in which there are no barriers, no restrictions on how far it is possible to go.

The loss of coherence and continuity in identity is associated with the loss of control over reality. This crisis of self-identity is, then, more than a personal crisis. Christopher Lasch argued it registers a significant transformation in the relationship between the self and the social world outside. This important cultural shift involves a loss of social meaning, and a consequent retreat from moral engagement. Morgardini observes, there is now a greater sense of alienation that makes it increasingly difficult to have relationship that demand more of the personality, such as love, friendship, generosity, forms of identification. The new technological environments of virtual reality and cyberspace confuse the boundaries between internal and external worlds, creating the illusion that internal and external realities are one and the same.

Virtual community and collective identity

The experience of cultural encounter and confrontation is something that is increasingly characteristic of life in our cities. Virtual communities do not exist in a different world. They must be situated in the context of these new cultural and political geographies. Virtual reality and cyberspace are commonly imagined in terms of reaction against, or opposition to, the real world. They are readily associated with a set of ideas about new and innovative forms of society and sociality.

Techno-sociality is seen as the basis for developing new and compensatory forms of community and conviviality. Networks are understood to be social nodes for fostering those fluid and multiple elective affinities that everyday urban life seldom, in fact, supports. But this involves a clear recognition that such communities exist in, and in relation to, everyday life in the real world: virtual communities of cyberspace live in the borderlands of both physical and virtual culture.

The use of computer-mediated communications, he argues, is driven by the hunger for community that grows in the breast of people around the world as more and more informal public spaces disappear from our real lives. That cyberspace can become one of the informal public places where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became the mall. In cyberspace, he maintains, we shall be able to recapture the sense of a social commons. Under conditions of virtual existence, it seems possible to recover the values and ideals that have been lost to the real world. Through this new medium, it is claimed; we shall be able to construct new sorts of community, linked by commonality of interest and affinity rather than by accidents of location. (Rheingold)

Solidarity in cyberspace seems to be a matter of extending the security of small-town Gemeinschaft to the transnational scale of the global village. We might see virtual and network association, as there is the invocation of community, but not the production of society. There is “group mind”, but not social encounter. What we have not an alternative society, but an alternative to society. Virtual reality can transmit a universal “language”…it is a perfect medium through which to communicate in what will be difficult times…common symbols will emphasize common humanity, expose common difficulties and help with common solutions.

The worlds we live in

We can see virtual culture, then, in terms of utopia: as expressing the principle of hope and the belief in a better world. That is the most obvious response. It is the one that virtual marketing and promotion always peddles. But we can also see virtual culture from an opposite perspective: instead of hopes for a new world, we would then see dissatisfactions about, and rejection of, an old one. This would have the more apocalyptic sense of looking back on the end of the world; what would be more significant would be the sense of an ending.

Through the development of new technologies, we are, indeed, more and more open to experience of de-realization and de-location. But we continue to have physical and localized existences. We must de-mythologize virtual culture if we are to assess the serious implications it has for our personal and collective lives. Paul Virilio imagines the coexistence of two societies: in the first society, you may be transported by the pleasures of fractal dreaming, the other society will accumulate the reality that has been repressed.