Wk 6 | Virtual/Actual
***Author's note: This week's post could be criticized as a self-interested way to better grasp my own research questions for this course; as such, you all might find the synthesis less than helpful for your own understandings of the readings. Apologies given and critical notes welcomed***
Souza e Silva writes that "while in the culture of calculations computer code and programming languages were used to interact with computers, in the culture of simulations everything was taken at interface value" (p. 50). Going back to last week's discussion, have we lost a critical awareness and understanding of our relationship to/with computer technology by interacting only at interface value? Did command prompt compel us to realize, maybe even embrace, the distance between ourselves and the technology?
I thought the treatment of virtuality as the dichotomy between simulation and representation offered a lot of clarity on a topic that I've been following for a good year and a half as an academic; frankly, I'm surprised and disappointed that I hadn't come across these pieces before, as I think they would have nudged me toward more productive conclusions in the philosophy of technology discussions that peppered my master's program coursework (and some of my thesis). Souza e Silva calls particular attention to the notion that digital images have no origin in physical reality, as opposed to art that is modeled after existing things. Since Souza e Silva uses science fiction movies to represent these points of discussion, I'll introduce one of my own. This concept compels me to think of the film Weird Science, in which two high school computer nerds get their hands on a software program that enables them to create a "real-life human knockout babe" from computer modeling tools. She is supposed to represent the epitome and culmination of the pair's collective ideal of 'the perfect woman,' better than what they could ever hope to find in real life. The digital image, in other words, comes to life and is represented in physical reality as hyperreality. I wonder how would Plato and Baudrillard react to seeing this movie?
Similarly, and building upon arguments I've raised earlier in this class, Souza e Silva's chapter reinforces my belief that for many meatspace losers but virtual gaming gods, the virtual world promotes a much stronger sense of "the real" than the physical world ever could . And although anti-virtuites like Albert Borgmann or Neil Postman (or Fink, I suppose) would decry these gaming gods as hopeless because of their supposed inability to cope with the challenges of living in the physical realm, Souza e Silva's discussion of the origins of Cartesian dualism and second cybernetics redoubles my arsenal of arguing for exactly the opposite scenario.
Moreover, these readings gave me an optimistic sense that a seed of understanding is beginning to bloom into a tree of coherence for my "virtual self as place" research topic. Souza e Silva, for example, writes that "The Thirteenth floor deals with what could happen if we could walk in and out of digital spaces, having them influence our lives in physical space. Yet with mobile technology devices people no longer enter the virtual space. They also live in it" (p. 67). I suppose this is what I was driving at without a steering wheel in my explication last week: if virtual space can be place, and we can live in virtual places as ourselves in a more enriching way (or as it can be perceived, at least), then can we not say that the virtual self creates a sense of place that exists in both the physical and virtual worlds? Is the virtual self becoming mobile?
Perhaps a line can be traced from these questions to Poster who, drawing upon Ryan (1994), suggests that "VR enables, indeed requires, the individual to participate in constructing the world as she or he experiences it, rendering it distinct from reading a fixed text" (p. 137). The "fixed text" here, as I read it, constitutes the material boundaries of the physical world, and while in meatspace we have a very limited impact on the construction of our world as we experience it (at least insofar as it impacts others), in cyberspace we all have the potential to be Faust. Bear with me here on the forked path. I can't resist bringing this concept back, as I see several relevant relationships here to the subversive shift from the real world to the virtual one by means of the frontier: having nowhere left to conquer and shape, Americans principally, and others, turned to virtual worlds, ephemeral pieces of digital real estate ready to be carved and molded by Faustian lords of cyber creation. [see Thomas P. Hughes' Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture for more.] Humans failed to reconcile their application of new technologies with a sustainable Edenistic utopia in their new American environment, but the will to recover the Garden after the Fall never subsided. Hence, Second Life and other expansive virtual worlds, which could be more accurately defined as ?Third Creation? If technology is the way humans create, and nature is the way God creates, what better way to assume divine powers than to use technology to create a nature that we control? There is no God in Second Life; avatars, as neo-Fausts, shape their own world, not only the products and services, but the boundaries of the environment itself.
Self-exploratory rants aside, perhaps my research dogs are barking up the wrong tree, so to speak, as Levy writes that "[s]trictly speaking, the virtual should not be compared with the real but the actual, for virtuality and actuality are merely two different ways of being" (p. 23). Perhaps my understanding of actual v. virtual needs more clarification, and to this end I invite your own interpretations. Ignoring the finer hairs being split here for a minute, Levy may in fact serve to buttress my arguments for the virtual self as place: "the fact of not being associated with any 'there,' of occurring only between things that are clearly situated, or of not being only 'there'...none of this prevents us from existing" (p.28). Existence, for many cyberspace/VR critics, must be defined in terms of meatspace interactions. Taking these exchanges online or moving between virtual conversations/meetings/relationships and actual ones does not undermine the sense of "existing" in the immaterial world.
What confounds me throughout all this is how quickly my understanding of "the virtual" can shift while moving between authors each week (textual mobility?). Deleuze, for example, in his treatment of Leibniz prompts me to think of co-existing alternate universes as virtual (think Bizarro Superman or Bizarro Jerry Seinfeld) to varying degrees of compossibility, which in turn makes me reflect on the multiple personas we create in myriad online environments as co-existing possibilities for the definition of our virtual self. Brain. Close. To. Critical Shutdown.
(As Always) Alternate Titles for this Post:
- "Why Deleuze likely obsessed over Schrodinger's cat"
- "Souza e Silva e Making Sense of it All"
- "Why I'll be hyperconscious of starting a sentence with "Actually..."
- "If a VR simulation of Disneyland gets set up at Disneyland, do we need another level of "real" beyond "hyperreal" to define the space inside?"
- "Jorge Borges: Inspiration for choose-your-own-adventure novels and for the toy development in the movie Big"