Shawn P. Wilbur

AN ARQUEOLOGY OFCYBERSPACES
VORTUALITY, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY

- An increasing number of people are finding their lives touched by collectivities which have nothing to do with physical proximity
- We might think of virtual community as a next arrival on the cultural scene
- Internet it is largely a text based affair
- (Referring to Howard Rheingold’s definition) “Sufficient human feeling” is a rather imprecise measure, full of assumptions about “the human” and about the ends of this human feeling would be “sufficient”
- The key ingredients are communication and feelings
- Community seems to refer primarily to relations of communality vetween persons and objects, and only rather imprecisely to the site of such community. What is important is a holding-in-common of qualities, properties, identities or ideas,
- The virtual seems most often to refer to that which appears to be (but is not) real, authentic, or proper. - Although it might have the same effects.
- The roots of “virtuality” are in “virtue”… the virtual and the virtuous were synonymous
o Cristian church can conjure the “virtual body” of Christ any place “where two ore tree are gathered together in Jesus name.
o Morality virtue is equated with hearth, strength and sexual purity
o The optical definition of the virtual undoubtedly shares some elements of the miraculous but refers specifically to the realm of appearances. Optical technologies deceive us in potentially useful ways, by bringing that which can’t be seen into view.
o Perhaps it should not be surprise that this extreme form of optical vituallity ha given rise to a fresh outburst of moral concern, such as the media’s titillated fascination with “cyber sex”
o Paul Virlo has suggested that technologies of the virtual are destinated to not only simulate the real, as Jean Baudrillard has suggested, but to replace it.
-The I in cyber culture – It is likely that those who become more immersed in Internet culture develop a sort of synesthesia which allows them to exercise all of the senses through their eyes and fingers.
o Many computer users seem to experience the movement into cyberspace as an unshackling from real-life constrains.
o The (emancipatory) discourse of the cyberspace suggest the possibility or stepping beyond and remaining one’s self in some lasting way through virtual identity-play. (Avalon)
o (Through a experiment with mirrors) In Lacan’s diagram, the virtual space “behind” the plane mirrors is where the subject imagines (through misrecognition) that its self exixts as a unity (rather than a some disorganized collection of identifications… howeverit seems likethe virtual is where all the action is.
o The persona that appears in cyberspace is potentially more fluid than those we assume in other aspects of our lives, in part because we can consciously shape it.
o What is clear at this stage of the game is that an engagement with virtual community in any adequate, rigorous way will involve us in the painstaking negotiation of a complex field of meanings and associations – one where the possibility of choosing between the real and the as good as real will constitute only one more question among many.
falmouth university college reference The cybercultures reader 303.4833 BEL