CRDM 701

Week 9 - Christin

Hillis writes ?If an escapist movement in real space toward an unpopulated and virgin promised land is now problematic or unavailable, for many, seeking out and creating ?information superhighways? that permit ?migration? to new ?electronic frontiers? offers an imaginative and apparently compelling utopian alternative to physically going ?on the road.?? (xvi-xvii)  Virtual reality, then, is allowing this innate human curiosity and desire for exploration to occur.  If we don?t have a physical ?real-world? space to go exploring, we?ll just create one in a virtual reality ? we?re no longer limited by the size of the planet.  But while we?re creating it, we?re going to do so and create a reality in the way we wish we could with our own physical realities.  Kind of defeats the purpose of exploration, don?t you think?

But do we really care about the idealized exploration that we hear about with Columbus and Louis and Clark?  Maybe we?re more concerned with exploring a morphed reality so as to recognize what?s wrong with the one we already have?  Hillis later writes that ?Cyberspace not only suggests that an ideal existence is one that is technologically mediated; it also continues and intensifies a longstanding project to alter, via the use of technology, subjectivity and the meaning of what it is to be human.? (xvii)  Technology allows us to repair, so to speak, a reality burdened by humanity.  Reality is in the eye of the beholder but directly affected by those around us, so if we don?t like our reality, as opposed to removing the people we don?t like (now that?s a scary thought!) we can use technology to fix it.  Bolter and Grusin describe how ?the advocates of ubiquitous computing express grandiloquently the implied goal of all advocates and practitioners of digital media: to reimagine and therefore to reform the world as a mediated (and remediated) space.?

In light of Baudrillard?s comparison of simulation and representation, then, we could argue that a virtual environment is not a representation of reality but a simulation.  According to Baudrillard, representation begins with the idea that ?the sign and the real are equivalent? whereas ?simulation starts from the utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value?. (11)  So then, I wonder, if a virtual world, like cyberspace, is truly a simulation of our own reality, why do we believe crimes to be committed online?  If the world is a simulation, wouldn?t the crimes committed within said simulation be a simulated crime?  I don?t think so, but would that mean that I would have to argue that a representation can maybe exist inside a simulation?  Baudrillard says that ?represenentation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.? (11)

Ok my brain hurts ? to reference Karla, tough week of readings!

Posted at 05:19PM Oct 24, 2007 by caphelps in General  |  Comments[1]