Eddie, Poster

Mark Poster tells us that virtual reality provides us with new modes of communication, where we are greeted to a super-physical world that changes and reacts according to our stimulation. There, we are free of our physical constrains, which brings about this question: in a world where identity is fluid, is gender, race and belief still relevant?

Yes, I say, because in our strange modern world there exists a tension. The lure of the virtual freedom is constantly pulling and yanking on the chains of our physical being. The simple fact is that no matter how thoroughly and wholly we can be represented in a virtual environment, we cannot exist solely as that virtual entity. Every single thought, idea and expression translated and transmitted through a digital world is still from a mind that is housed in flesh and bones. Virtual reality can emulate, substitute and replace, but it cannot eliminate the physical as a part of its being.

Also, consider our drive to engage in virtual interactions. We communicate and traverse on the Internet ultimately to obtain information. What we seek to learn through the exchange is always of interest to our dominant physical life. The news we view online tells us about the war in Iraq or other events corresponding to our tangible world. Online stock prices translate into real world earnings or losses. What we do not usually care for is information that pertains only to the virtual world, like finding out what ChickMachine117 said on a discussion board last night. We understand that change and temporality is the dominant mode of the virtual world. We know that existence in that virtual world is fickle and never long-lasting. Most importantly, we realize the more basic and more permanent existence that we all have to ultimately face once the leash of the physical world pulls hard enough to tear us away from virtual reality. Thus, insult on the internet is often something to the tune of “you are still a loser living in the basement of your parents’ house.” Reality matters.

So gender, race and belief matter, even in the virtual world. Even in a simulated world, we want to reenact, as closely as we can, the types of interaction and human exchange we recognize in our real life: we want the interactions to carry forth to our physical world as much as possible. People constantly measure the worth and purpose of virtual interactions by how much they affect the material world, since it is only there that effects are permanent, long-lasting and significant. The reliance on reality dictates that the virtual simply cannot form its own mode of existence totally separate and unique from the physical. The virtual life will always be an extension of the real.

No matter how much we yearn for the freedom of the virtual, our link to the real is also our umbilical cord. The wish to be wholly separate and to break free from our flesh is an ever growing tension to that link. Virtual worlds now have the “immense potential for fantasy, self-discovery and self-construction” as Poster predicted and have demonstrated the draw to strain the link with reality to the point of breaking. It has pulled people down the hierarchy of needs: sedating aspirations, surrendering relations and then forgoing basic human needs like food and sleep, and it has shown us terrifying instances of people finally breaking free of their fleshly bounds. The immediate destruction of both worlds, both real and virtual is all that follows. Such is the sad end witnessed from reports of people indulging in games until their bitter deaths. Until we learn to survive our journey to the virtual world, everything that is real is relevant to the virtual.