Real Reality vs Virtuality
A personal view

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The whole area of reality vs. virtuality is something I can't help but keep chewing over as I go through the day. What is real in our lives and what is virtual? For example, if my wife and I go and plant vegetables or herbs in our little allotment/garden, that's pretty real, isn't it? I'm working with real soil, real seeds, etc. Yet five minutes later I'm working on my Web site, building it up into (I hope) something that others will want to see and relate to. Maybe the garden and the Web site are at opposite ends of the RL-VR (Real Life-Virtual Reality) spectrum as it relates to my life. Yet both are still diirect extensions of my personality. They are both "real" to me. I'd hope people would admire my garden as much as they would my Web site (or, if they find fault with either, they'd let me know).

Obviously, if I'm to accept them both as "part" of my personality, I have to come to some accommodation with myself about how much of my life is "real", and how much "virtual". One more example: My brother and his girlfriend, who live in Scotland, now have two baby daughters, the second of which was born last week. I haven't seen either of them yet (though I will when I go back home in August). My entire knowledge about these two newest members of my family is entirely virtual, consisting of photographs, videotapes, letters, and telephone conversations where the eldest says "hello, Doodie" to me on the phone. If I put photos of little Hannah and Katie up on the Web, or video or sound files of them, that may extend the virtual aspect of their presence (as articulated through me) but it wouldn't make any difference to the fact that, to me, their existence is entirely virtual. Although I like to tell people about my two nieces, and how much they mean to me, that part of "my life" resides pretty solidly up on the virtual plane, just like the life-size map of the fictional kingdom overlaid on the real in the Borges story. Yet I have to accept that virtuality, since it's the only way I can know anything at all about these two children. I have had my presence electronically extended to them, as they have been extended to me (remember 'telepresence'?), but obviously something has been lost in the transaction.

OK, this might sound quite simple, even quaint, yet these types of examples are really the points of entry for us all to think about how virtuality impacts our lives. And remember, computers and the Web are just extensions of forces (e.g., television, newspapers, electric light, even the mail) that have long been altering our lives -- and our perceptions of the world -- in a series of incremental steps over the years. (Actually, that's pretty much a *technological determinist* argument; feel free to disagree.) We do need to realize that this RL-VR debate, in its broad terms, is becoming more and more resonant in our culture -- it's just not going to go away (e.g., it's also the basis of much of our culture, such as the new Jim Carrey movie, The Truman Show.) As technology more and more becomes part of our lives, we use it to extend our knowledge of the whole world, even while we know less and less about our immediate environment. We have to make more and more accommodations between the local and the global, the real and the virtual. Where is this going to lead us?

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STRUCTURALISM & POSTSTRUCTURALISM

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