‘Technology is often viewed as a source of separation between people, a barrier… Conversations are held with distant and absent others (Shields 1992). Alienation and dehumanization. A separation of body and mind. Nonetheless, ‘presence’ doesn’t just vanish. Technology mediates presence. Within computer communication technology, there are ways that allow us to be present to each other, with our bodies, interacting in a holistic manner.
Bodies cannot be escaped, for we express this part of ourselves as we experience together. Although some attempt to conceal the status of their bodies, it is betrayed unless we resort to presenting another kind of body in our communications. While we man ‘lose ourselves’ in a good book or in the trance-like state of online interaction, we know that this is a change of consciousness; something in the mind, not the body.’ – pg 58
‘Emoticons are expressed through behaviours including ‘vocal qualities, body movements, and facial expressions’ (Sdorow 1990:363).’ – pg 60
‘We experience the system through our bodily systems, and we exchange this experience with others through the communication of the network.; – pg 61-62
‘Henri Bergson also argues for a multiplicity of expression. In Matter and Memory (1978), he writes that memories may not live in the past: indeed the past is gone as a construct, and what we have is a now. In our perception of the moment, memory comes to life through our activity as a self that draws on the whole of our experiences: ‘Every perception fills a certain depth of duration, prolongs the past into the present, and thereby partakes of memory’ (Bergson 1978: 325).’
If the present partakes of memories, then when someone writes of an event that has saddened them, and they add 🙁 to the end of the statement, do we not then ‘see’ the sad face, hear the sad words and possibly feel sad along with the writer?’ – pg 66-67
‘To be in the present, writing, speaking and perceiving in the moment, is to be able to respond, to be active in the now. The present, writes Bergson ‘is that which acts on us and which makes us act, it is sensory and it is motor; – our present is above all, the state of our body’ (1978: 320). – pg 67
‘Also, due to the use of pseudonyms, and the inability to physically check whether the gender that you present on the board is consistent with your physical body, users often ask each other if they have met the new user. Often there will be mistrust as to whether this user is ‘real’ until there has been physical verification. This also happens when a user has multiple pseudonyms, with varying genders. Physical contact is the determining factor of reality.’ – pg 68
‘The screen, keyboard and monitor are physically in contact with the user, with the flesh up against barrier after barrier.’ – pg 68
‘As Ann Game asserts:
‘…experience need not be equated with presence. Once we think of mediations as constitutive, as having immediacy in the body, ‘experience’, understood here as unconscious, marked by memory traces and bodily, becomes central to the critique of presence.’ (Game 1991: 147)
Memory traces, called up by the body, parts of the body themselves, allow us to experience with our physical selves and all the other multiple layers that constitute us in ways that do not require us to be in the flesh.’ – pg 69
‘Cyberspace…has been conceived as ‘a globally networked, computer-sustained, computer-accessed, multi-dimensional, artificial or “virtual” reality’ (Benedikt 1992:122). To date, no single technology or machine circumscribes this emerging technology/ medium of virtual reality (VR) – a term confusingly interchanged with cyberspace but here understood as the technical means of access to the ‘parallel’, disembodies and increasingly networked visual ‘world’ named cyberspace. An increasing variety of virtual technologies offers windows on to this cyberspace environment that also has been defined as one in which the user feels present (Biocca 1992a: 6), yet where things have no physical form and are composed of electronic data bits and particles of light.’ – pg 70
‘Much interesting writing about cyberspace and VR assumes the technology as a given. However it is useful to examine the human agency that makes this technology possible. What follows is an attempt to do so, a narrative informed by three assumptions, first, that the technology represents an instance of an ongoing (Western) motivation to alter conceptions of space; second, that its development is inflected by a desire on the part of a disembodied, alienated subjectivity for transcendence of bodily limits; and third, that this cybernetically achieved transcendence – as reflected in the 1980s cyberpunk desire to leave the body or ‘ meat’ behind and float as pure data in cyberspace – is also a vehicle for merging a hyper-individuated modern consciousness into a larger whole.’ – pg 70-71
‘The roots of yearning for a virtual world are anchored by an ongoing Western belief in vision as the most noble organ and sensual metaphor for extending understanding. This belief has helped set the stage for an emblematic virtual world of visual language that promises ‘transcendence’ and affectivity in images, something denied us to date by our physical embodiment. Imaginary transcendence is made more desirable by a rational / empirical system of belief and knowledge organization that denied holism between mind and body, one in which mind centres meaning, and partitions itself from the body, which is then judged an artifact, hence worth suspending.’ – pg 71
‘In the (very near) future, Gibson suggests, celebrity status will be Divine, a potential eventuality that extends and complements terrain explored by Joh Fiske (1993) in his study of Elvis, celebrity status, and the popular grasp of science.
In arguing the connection between the will to VR and psychedelia, Terance McKenna notes that ‘technology has already proven that it is the drug most palatable to the Western mind’ (1991: 233). In a society of addiction, he wonders if VR will be judged by administrators as a safe and harmless substitute for drugs, but on. level more germane to this review he notes that the synesthesia facilitated by VR echoes the hallucinogenic reality where vocal performances are experienced visually and tactilely’ – pg 92-93
‘As Marshall McLuhan taught. any new medium forms an environment that casts deep cultural shadows. Major technologies qualify as media if they provide extensions of biological abilities. Radar, sonar and aircraft extend animal capabilities. Clothes and houses extend the skin, Wheels extend the legs, radio the voice and ears, cameras the eye, tape recorders and computers the brain. Money stores human energy, Because such technologies do what bodies once did, they produce cultural mutation. A culture is partly an order of sensory practices and preferences.’ – pg 101
‘Jacked into the matrix, they find a lateral world of people cooperatively connecting to play roles, share ideas and experiences, and live fantasies.’ – pg 103
‘As McLuhan and Fiore (1967: 94-5) tell us: ‘Electric circuitry is orientalizing the Western legacy. The contained, the distinct, the separate – are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused.’ Under power’s endless refraction within the new electronic dispensation, old assumptions about the nature of identity have quietly vanished. Our individual concreteness dissolves in favour of the fluid, the homogeneous and the universal.’ – pg 104
‘Has the once dominant conceptual category of the ‘individual’ now reconstructed itself into a universal ‘user’? What can one say of a political discourse carried out between users? Because cyberspace forms an extension of everyone’s nervous system, it forms a seamless web that pushes toward a convergent yet conflictual unity.’ – pg 105
‘Natural and human-constructed boundaries in space and time have become harder to differentiate. Electronics mediate most human interactions.’ – pg 112
‘The mechanisms of computer operations are hidden works, always beyond human sensory perception. McLuhan said every new technology changes how our sense organs operate to perceive reality, and it may be that computer technology changes not only our perception of reality but also our very selves. Electronic pulses permeate our daily lives. The extent of demand for greater and greater interdependency in human-computer interaction compels us to consider the computer as more than just and instrument or machine. It has become an ‘evocative object’, a medium through which we project and realize our thoughts and undertakings.’ – pg 113
‘In studying computer culture Sherry Turkle (1984: 3) focuses on the ‘subjective computer’…it ‘affects the way we think, especially the way we think about ourselves’…’It challenges our notions not only of time and distance, but also of mind.’ – pg 113
‘Consciousness in virtual worlds
Many have identified the reality and identity construction that is said to occur in both networked virtual worlds on the Internet and in multi sensory virtual reality as an ‘altered state of consciousness’ that produces heightened awareness and transcendence (Benedikt 1993; Stenger 1993; Rushkoff 1994). ‘ pg 143
Those worrying that it is yet another opportunity for hegemonic structures to commodify reality and further the cause of global capitalism (Kroker 1994; Hayward 1993; Coyle 1993).’ – pg 143
‘The impacts and implications of virtual reality are as hotly debated among users of this medium as they are among theorists, since VR suggest new ways of considering communication, reality, identity and community as well as the relationships between the body, mind and machines. The notion that virtual reality potentially induces an altered state of conciousness and a sense of disembodiment begins with Gibson’s ficticious ‘cyberspace’ as a space of ‘consensual hallucination’ (1984). – pg 144
‘Both perspectives recognize that this technology alters the perception of an objective reality and allude to the erotic appeal of transcending the physical world. The ‘self’ is transformed and the implications run deep.’ – pg 145
‘In this sense, virtual reality is much like science fiction or the 1960’s drug culture, offering the prospect of gaining insight into ancient philosphocal questions through the exploration of alternative realities.’ – pg 145
‘It is also suggested that virtual reality is akin to other altered states of consciousness such as dreams, daydreams, hallucinations and religious visions (Sherman and Judkins 1992: 123) and the virtual reality experience is also equated with the experience of psychedelic drugs.’ – pg 146
‘Those who are shy and introverted in real life, have an outlet to explore more powerful personae, and because of users are unencumbered by the material determinants of social value of ‘real life’, such as appearance, those more powerful identities may be explored more fully in the medium, where the determinants of status and popularity are existent, but less tangible.’ – pg 148
‘The erotic appeal of virtual reality also cannot be (and in no way is) overlooked. Fantasy and imagination are often so used in conjunction with interactive computer-mediated communication to fulfil shared fantasies in an erotic ‘consensual hallucination’. – pg 148
‘The question remains: is the virtual reality experience one that induces transcendence or an altered state of consciousness?’ – pg 149
‘Virtual reality should not be constructed in opposition to ‘real’ reality, but rather as an extension of the latter. According to Claudia Springer.
It would be inappropriate to call Virtual Reality an escape from reality, since what it does is provide an alternative reality, where ‘being somewhere does not require physical presence and ‘doing something does not result in any changes in the physical world (Springer 1991:314)
Paradoxically, ‘real’ reality itself is already a virtual reality, In order to make sense of this paradox we must invoke Lacan’s distinction between the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real.
The Real, according to Lacan, is not synonymous with reality, but with that which reality tries to screen out.’ – pg 160
‘Objects in virtual reality differ from material objects to the extent that they sexist only by virtue of human intention. Virtual objects are also fully masterable, or mutable – they process none of the resistances of material objects, and produce no unwanted effects’ – pg 161
‘Cyberspace and the abject
Cyberspace has been hailed by many as a historical revolution, in which technology is no longer a means of mastering the human environment, but in fact becomes the human environment. Paradoxically, by replacing the material environment, cyberspace fully masters it. The material is fully removed from the realm of human techne, ever present but containing no positive content. In effect, it is reduced from the status of object to that of abject: a senseless, obscene intrusion.’ – pg 164
‘ Cyberspace, to the extent that it involves a denial of the material, partakes in this ‘paranoid rage’ (J Kristeva). Paranoia, the fear of losing oneself, is the extreme form of the Freudian ego . the subject under siege which clings tenaciously to its present mode of subjectification, hiding behind ‘protective shields’. What is cyberspace if not the ultimate protective shield against the threat posed by otherness?
The body, as a piece of the Real, or the material, evades semiotic reduction, as well as practices aimed at fully manipulating it. Weight-loss programmes and body-building aim at a fully disciplined body, and yet an excess always remains, something which resists, and therefore necessitates the continued operation of disciplinary practises, In cyberspace the body is fully malleable indeed even disposable. In Gibson’s Neuromancer, bodies are either constructed as abject (or ‘meat’), or fully penetrable by technology, reminiscent of a perverse version of Haraway’s cyborg (1991). ‘ – pg 165
The promise of cyberspace is to efface the body fully, with all of its resistances and limits, As Stone argues,
Forgetting about the body is an old Cartesian trick, one that has unpleasant consequences for those bodies who’s speech is silenced by the act of our forgetting the body is founded – usually women and minorities. (Stone 1992″ 113).’ – pg 166
‘The desire for a space within which all desires can be played out, where the very nature of reality is a narcissistic reflection of the user’s desire, is worthy of analysis. We should be suspicious of any technology which promises to eliminate the problems of the symbolic – or the problems of the polity. Cyberspace, as it is construed by its proponents, promises to do just that. The question that is now worth asking is, what is being lost?’ – pg 167
‘It is of enormous interest to ask how the specific technologies of networks and virtual reality came to be associated in cyberspace. Surely the desire prefigured the technological developments, so the desire has in fact guided the development of cyberspace technologies… It is also worth considering the fact that most public access to virtual reality has been in shopping malls, or arcades. Virtual reality has a number of applications, but those intent on marketing the technologies have stressed its potential for ‘fulfilling desires’. By adapting the technologies to consumer demand – a phrase which takes on significant import if read in Lacanian terms – the promise of cyberspace will likely be guided by the structures of desire I have discussed.’ – pg 167
‘Cyberfeminism has, however, emerged as more than a survey or observation of the new trends and possibilities opened up by the telecoms revolution. Complex systems and virtual worlds are not only important because they open spaces for existing women within an already existing culture, but also because of the extent to which they undermine both the world-view and material reality of two thousand years of patriarchal control.’ – pg 170