This week we delve a little deeper into the contested philosophy that lies behind new communication technology, 'social media', the ‘Free Culture’ movement and cyberpunk literature. This topic has presented possibly the most challenging ideas of all the lectures in this course to date: once able to wrap my head around [some of] these ideas, I found that I did not necessarily subscribe to the overriding tenet of modern thought outlined below…
The Western school of philosophical thought, dominant until the early twentieth century and the communication technologies development explosion, was shaped by the ideas of Plato, Parmenides’ sole poetic work, the widely adopted Socratic Method… Undeniably, these works have had a significant impact on the progress and practice of scientific and general philosophical disciplines that firmly differentiate reality and representation. The increasing pervasiveness and convergence of communication technologies in our lives, however, brings us ever closer to a Virtual Reality (VR) indistinguishable from reality. The direction of this progress is towards a seamless human-computer interface capable of blurring the lines between virtual and actual worlds; of rejuvenating many industries, encompassing military applications, education and training, environmental simulation and town planning. This once-dubious vision for the future was prophesied (albeit in dystopian fashion) in such cyberpunk works as Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984), The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) and The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999).
Today, the Oxford English Dictionary describes ‘virtual reality’ as “…not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so”. Andy and Lana Wachowski played with this definition with The Matrix, forcing us to question the place of hyper-realistic VR in our lives; to consider the possibility that circumstances such as those illustrated in The Matrix (humans blissfully ignorant of their domination by sentient machines) are transpiring now.
The dialogue of this lecture gave me the same unsettling feeling that I experienced as I watched Inception at the Yatala drive-in a few months ago. The key question asked by that film – how can we be sure that what we are experiencing is reality? – was oddly reminiscent of the voyeuristic themes explored in The Truman Show, and the way concepts of reality and virtuality were shaken up by The Matrix. Just as those protagonists and anti-heroes found doubt (or at least the ‘suggestion’ of an alternative) of the ‘realness’ of reality to be the ultimate predicament, I found myself entertaining vague doubts and philosophising about how we know the difference between dreams, virtual realities, and reality or actuality. The challenging ideas presented in Inception in particular led me to consider that for some people, defining realities isn’t important – it’s deciding which reality is preferable, and discovering how to live as completely as possible in that preferred reality, be it virtual, actual or otherwise.
Leonardo could have lived indefinitely with his wife in any of a number of dream worlds; Truman might have decided to continue living in the ‘bubble’; you or I (contemporary technology users) might, in the near future, opt to spend the majority of our time and energy interacting within virtual worlds and communities, rather than ‘actual’ ones: worlds that are just as ‘real’ – just as significant as reality. Edward Castronova (2007) predicts an exodus of hundreds of millions of people from the real world to the virtual over the next two generations, claiming that 20 to 30 million people worldwide currently immerse themselves regularly in “…worlds of perpetual fantasy” (p. xiv).
The prospect of further blurring of the lines between virtuality and truth as a consequence of changes to the global social climate I find both disconcerting and intriguing. Call me old-fashioned, but, like Socrates, I like to keep my actual and virtual worlds in two neat piles. While I can’t keep these two piles from getting mixed up from time to time, I like to think that I, at least, will not be one of the hundreds of millions of users who choose to throw everything into one pile and reside indefinitely in VR.
Reference List
Castronova, E. (2007). Exodus to the virtual world: How online fun is changing reality. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Oxford University Press. (2010). Oxford Dictionaries: virtual. Retrieved September 29, 2010, from
http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0930170#m_en_gb0930170
http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0930170#m_en_gb0930170
Rorty, R. (2009). Philosophy and the mirror of nature [2nd ed.]. New Jersey, USA; Oxfordshire, UK: Princeton University Press.
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