Cyberspace is, according to William Gibson, a “consensual Hallucination”. The contemporary debate on cyberspace and virtual reality is something of consensual hallucination, too. You might think of cyberspace as a utopian vision for postmodern times. Cyberspace is projected as the same kind of nowhere- somewhere, but it has no location.
We cannot make of our real world whatever we wish to make of it. Virtual Reality may turn out to be a great deal more comfortable than our own imperfect reality.
All this is driven by a feverish belief in transcendence; a faith that, this time round, a new technology will finally and truly deliver us form the limitation and the frustrations of this imperfect world. Virtual reality, “is the hope for the next century”.
This vision of electronic community as the “ good society”.
There is no alternative and more perfect future word of cyberspace and virtual reality. We are living a real world, and must recognize that it is indeed the case that we cannot make of its social and political realities, and it is in this context that we must assess their significance.
In the ultimate artificial reality, physical appearance will be completely compostable.
Identities are compostable in so far as the constraints of the real world and real-world body are overcome in the artificial domain.
In this accommodating reality, the self is reconstituted as a fluid and polymorphous entity. Identities can be selected or discarded almost at will, as in a game or a fiction.
This question of technology and identity has been taken up in quite different ways, electronic domain.
Anything you can think of, dream of, hallucinate can be created. The imagination is dead: only the technology is new.
Not only are we forced to live inside the physical world, we are made of it and we are almost powerless in it.
The new technology provides the opportunity to go back and to explore what might have been able to sustain the infantile experience of power and infinite possibility.
The technology is invested by omnipotence fantasies.
In cyberspace, there are possibilities for exporting the complexities of self-identity, including the relation between mental space and the bodily other.
Virtual reality environment allow their user to choose their disguises and assume alternative identities.
Cyberspace is imagined as a zone of unlimited freedom, a grid reference for free experimentation, an atmosphere in each there are no barriers, no restrictions on how far it is possible to go.
The new virtual technologies now provide a space in which to resist or embrace post modernity. It is a space in which the imperatives and impositions of the real world may be effaced.
The virtual world may be seen as constituting a protective container within which all wishes are gratified. In other cases, as I have again suggested, the created environment may respond to psychotic states of mind.
It is not my intention to deny the imaginative possibilities inherent in the new technologies, but rather to consider what is the nature of the imagination that is being sustained. Notion of potential space: the third area of human living, neither inside the individual nor outside in the world of shared reality, the space of creative playing and cultural experience.
Potential space is a transitional space. It is in this intermediate space, through the interaction of both internal and external realities, that moral sense is evolved.
Many of those who have considered these issues have made the assumption that they are dealing with a self contained and autonomous domain of technology. Again that the new technological developments must be situated in the transforming itself. The maps are being broken apart and rearranged.
