CRDM 701

Week 9 - Kathy

When talking about the relationship between communication and the ways that reality is culturally constructed, Hillis suggests that virtual environments will "broaden the bandwidth array of sensory information users may transmit about themselves as they begin to extend their selves conceptually via these image technologies across a global terrain" (1999, p. xxxvi). I would be interested to read more about the way that various forces came together to shape the VE available today, but am also interested in looking at how forces acting on our information networks  have the potential to alter, influence, and control the ways that we construct our "selves" in the virtual.

Virtual technologies allow humans control not only over selves, but also the construction of a reality made of both natural and synthetic parts.  Hillis writes that VR is a ?technico-cultural fix invented by a postmodern sensibility to both as a bulwark against uncertainty instigated by the perceived death of the real and as an uncanny artifact created by a latter-day nostalgic Dr. Frankenstein in search of a means of producing a seemingly vanquished (meaningful) reality? (Hillis, 1999, p. xxix-xxx).   Is this ?patch? for reality what Baudrillard is talking about when he discusses the precession of simulacra?

Bolter and Grusin (?) write that "the desire for immediacy is apparent in claims that digital images are more exciting, lively, and realistic than mere text on a computer screen and that a videoconference will lead to more effective communication than a telephone call" (p.23). As virtual environments become more advanced and more immersive, so too will the bandwidth - placing the evolution of or virtual environments in the hands of telecom companies and regulatory bodies. Their discussions on transparency and immediacy in VEs made me think about Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash (read this over winter break if you haven't already!), where individuals spend time in a place called the "Metaverse" which can be thought of as a much more immersive, interactive, and potent version of Second Life. In the virtual world in this novel, people enter the Metaverse with either custom or generic avatars, and if on a public (slower) connection, the avatar appears as a two dimensional, grainy, and in black and white. I bring this example in here to illustrate the extent to which immediacy can be effected by the speeds we dial in at, and as more and more of our daily business moves online, we have to think about the impacts that connection speed might have on the way that we access and use these worlds.

Virtual environments, such as Stephenson's metaverse and the worlds created in military training programs are all examples of "generation by models of a real without origin or reality" - what Baudrillard would call a hyperreal ? "the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere" (1983, p.3). Within these new worlds, looking at virtual geographies as complex assemblages can shed new light on the ways in which reality is being produced, and the possibilities and limitations of those realities. Hillis? project examines "a facsimile of this earth - a virtual geography that charts an array of representational spaces from the fantastical to the realistic" (1999, xxiii), and similarly, Wiley writes that "Human individuals and collectivities are not (or at least not necessarily) narrow, ideologically defined subjects; they are complex and dynamic assemblages of matter, energy, affect and subjectivity articulated into particular organizations of space, place and mobility" (p.79).  It seems that to make sense of our increasingly networked world we must have a sense of ?the lay of the virtual land? which is best mapped by examining where forces intersect to create and compose our worlds and our selves.

What a tough week of readings! See you all Thursday -

Posted at 01:16PM Oct 24, 2007 by kfoswald in Week 9  |  Comments[1]