In his book, Carr writes, “The importance of such skills [the ones fostered by computer game play] shouldn’t be taken lightly. As our work and social lives come to center on the use of electronic media, the faster we’re able to navigate those media and the more adroitly we’re able to shift our attention among online tasks, the more valuable we’re likely to become as employees and even as friends and colleagues” (140). Jane McGonigal takes this argument one step further, arguing that the skills developed in online game play are the skills that can help us save the world. Or more correctly, she believe that games reinforce behavior and attitudes that may prove necessary for solving our real world problems.

The first such attitude is what she describes as “urgent optimism.” Unfortunately, she admits, so far this urgent optimism translates into the belief that one can change the virtual world only, and not the real world (the very thing she hopes to change with her games). But the point is that, whereas in the real world we feel increasingly disempowered to make real change, paralyzed by the seeming impossibility of affecting big problems, in the game world, these players feel like nothing is impossible. I would agree that we certainly need more of this.

The second behavior is that gamers are really good at weaving a social fabric. I might suggest that the weaving of this fabric is a game in itself – strategic alliances. My real concern here is that it reinforces the slightly sick transformation of ‘friendship’ that is occurring with our social media. And the other is that this notion of geographically boundless collaboration itself has environmental implications, when we consider the resources that go in to maintaining these connections (see Mobile Lives). But I am torn here, because in my work, I’m arguing that we need greater social connections, and these gamers are doing this. I suppose the difference is that I’m suggesting that the connections are themselves better (i.e. they are more fulfilling, and meaningful), whereas she is implying that these connections need to be more numerous, and more organized, which itself betrays a worldview bias.

The third attitude is what she calls “blissful productivity.” This is the idea that humans are most human when they are being productive, and that we feel good about this. I find this funny, in that it seems like the latest transformation of the Protestant Ethic to fit our modern world. But yes, it would be nice if these productive efforts were focused on changing the world for the better, rather than on making money (and in turn, working to perpetuate the world as it is now).

And finally, she identifies “epic meaning” as being something that gamers are drawn to. When describing the appeal of her game, A World Without Oil, she says blithely that “nobody wants to change how they live because it’s good for the world, or because they’re supposed to,” but that if you immerse people in an epic game, they can in a sense be tricked into doing what’s good for the world (though she didn’t phrase it that way). I find this really sad on the one hand, because I can’t fathom why our sustainability problems are not ‘epic’ enough to engender this motivation. On the other hand, my research argues something not too dissimilar! – namely that I suggest that people need to be re-immersed (reminded in some cases) in a meaningfilled world, one that is passed down through great myths and spiritual traditions, in order that they adopt these more harmonious behaviors. (See Walker’s Sustainable By Design.) As she said, those who participated in the epic game, continued the practices learned years after the game ended. This suggests that this is likely the key, and that I am on the right track. You have to provide people with a greater reason to want to change the world. I just sort of wish it wasn’t by having them play games online.

McGonigal has to overcome many people’s kneejerk reaction to immersion. People might argue that immersion is bad – or if not inherently bad, that this amount of time immersed in a fictional world is to the detriment of real world health/happiness/productivity, etc.. I don’t think immersion is bad (see Ryan post). And I don’t think that the amount of time spent means that it is necessarily bad either. It all depends on what you are gaining from that engagement. My issue is that the games are built within the same paradigm that seems to be producing an unsustainable relationship between humans and the planet. They reinforce particular kinds of thinking (as I mentioned before about collaboration/information exchange, for example), and they increase our addiction to computer technologies, which has both psychological and environmental implications. For example, she quickly mentions how many more gamers will be using mobile devices to connect to these games, and dismisses the environmental impact by saying that the power they use will be increasingly ‘green’. I worry that there will be a point at which these lines cross on the graph, and that as we use more and more devices/energy, we are running out of time to use these games to solve these huge problems – or indeed to do anything to solve them. Increased gaming accelerates the crises in some ways, just in terms of the energy cost of doing so.

And as for the ‘escapism’ arguments against immersion, she is not advocating exodus into virtual reality. She doesn’t want to make better games so that we have a better place to escape to. She wants to make better games that help us make our real world better. I think this is a great mission.

Finally, I must come back to the question she asks, which is: In all of the zillions of hours we spend gaming, what exactly are we training for? She quotes a figure that the average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming, which, according to Malcolm Gladwell’s research, means that we are producing a fleet of gaming ‘virtuosos’. But really, are these individuals ‘virtuosos’ or ‘idiot savants’? I guess I think that being a great computer gamer may not be that helpful when the time comes that we disengage from computer technology. If we are creating a generation of people who are excellent at solving problems specifically with computer – or a she suggests, we are evolving to think like this – then we may be in big trouble because. What happens when we try to unplug? Do we know how to function without these tools? We are not preparing ourselves for Power Down. And as Carr shows, using computers to help us solve problems does not make us better problem solvers, but worse….

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Chapter 8 – Can Coherence Be Saved?: Selective Interactivity and Narrativity
& Chapter 9 – Participatory Interactivity from Life Situations to Drama
& Chapter 10 – Participatory Interactivity in Electronic Media
(& Conclusion)

I have argued elsewhere that the aim in designing an alternative Internet is to provide Real Choice to people who would otherwise have to twist themselves and their values in order to participate in society. Here, again, we see that the evolution of art/literature is helpful in making the case for me; that both have deluded people that what they offer is this Real Choice. Ryan quotes Julian Barnes:

When the writer provides two different endings to his novel (why two? why not a hundred?), does the reader seriously imagine he is being ‘offered a choice’ and that the work is reflecting life’s variable outcomes? Such a ‘choice’ is never real, because the reader is obliged to consume both endings. In life, we make a decision – or a decision makes us – and we go one way; had we made a different decision… we would have been elsewhere. The novel with two endings doesn’t reproduce this reality: it merely takes us down two diverging paths. It’s a form of cubism, I suppose. And that’s all right; but let’s not deceive ourselves about the artifice involved. / After all, if novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of life’s possibilities, this is what they’d do. At the back of the book would be a series of sealed enveloped in various colors. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending; Traditional Half-and-Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist Arbitrary Ending… and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to destroy the envelopes you didn’t select. That’s what I call offering the reader a choice of endings (242).

I suggest that what we would offer in envelopes in terms of Real Choice for the Internet would be different value sets: Materialistic/Consumerist; Capitalistic/Efficient; Compassionate/Selfless, etc..

Most eloquently in the following passage Ryan makes the point that what we think of as choice is an illusion, saying, “Even in a conceptualization that presents hypertext as a matrix of worlds and of stories, what readers do is control the strings of the fictional worlds through either reasoned or arbitrary choices, but they are themselves the puppets of the author” (283). This is exactly what I’ve been trying to argue for Internet use: that people think they are completely free in this space, but that they are being manipulated completely by the rules of the space, and furthermore the space actively participates in deluding them that they are free.

Ryan makes an interesting point about design as narrative, that it is up to the designer to envision the plot of the product’s use: “The system designer must be able to foresee the possible actions of the user and to streamline them toward the desired effect. The user should progress under the impression that his actions determine the course of the plot, when in fact his choices are set up by the system as a function of the effect to be reached. The need to steer the user toward a certain goal without revealing this purpose (for fear of spoiling its effect) explains why dramatic structure, the fullest form of narrativity, is also the most problematic of interactive design” (246). I think we tend to forget that in creating a product for use, we provide the setting of the story, setting the parameters around which a possible narrative scenario can conceivably take place; and this setting is in fact the value sets that the product embodies. It is no wonder that products prescribe certain use that is in line with these values.

Ryan quotes an interesting passage from Randall Walser with regards to the function of cyberspace media: “Whereas film is used to show a reality to an audience, cyberspace is used to give a virtual body, and a role, to everyone in the audience. Print and radio tell; stage and film show; cyberspace embodies…. Whereas the playwright and the filmmaker both try to communicate the idea of an experience, the spacemaker tries to communicate the experience itself. A spacemaker sets up a world for an audience to act directly within, and not just so the audience can imagine they are experiencing an interesting reality, but so they can experience it directly…. Thus the spacemaker can never hope to communicate a particular reality, but only to set up opportunities for certain kinds of realities to emerge. The filmmaker says, ‘Look, I’ll show you.’ The spacemaker says, ‘Here, I’ll help you discover’” (306). This fits well with the above notion of the system designer as the creator of setting. And interestingly, it shows that while many people associate the Internet with a lack of embodiment, cyberspace embodies in the Foucauldian sense, in that it subjectifies. It also implies that the medium itself helps the ‘user’ discover; but that said, it helps the ‘user’ discover only the particular realities it allows to be discovered. In other words, it prescribes a way of seeing and discovering that precludes alternative vision. I think this is what I’m so interested in changing, or creating alternatives for. As it is now, cyberspace is a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing worldview that allows users to discover again and again the merit of the kind of thinking that created the Internet in the first place. I guess what I’m asking is if people are going to embody the reality promoted by the medium of the Internet, should we not put some consideration into the version of reality we wish to promote? How can people discover themselves and their world as being more than this materialistic vision promoted by cyberspace now?

I picked up on a useful term, namely “emergent.” Ryan writes, “Emergent is the favorite term of contemporary literary theory for a type of meaning that comes out of the text, rather than goes into it, and that is produced dynamically in the interaction between the text and the reader” (258). I think this is a fundamental truth about the construction of the Internet, that it is emergent. It will become whatever it will become through its use by people. I guess I wonder if an especially radical revisioning of the Internet might come in challenging the assumed value of this emergent quality.

Ryan also implies that engagement with media can have a psychological effect on people. This is something that Juliet B. Schor (Born to Buy, 2004) argued in relation to consumerist engagement:

High consumer involvement is a significant cause of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and psychosomatic complaints. Psychologically healthy children will be made worse off if they become more enmeshed in the culture of getting and spending. Children with emotional problems will be helped if they disengage from the worlds that corporations are constructing for them…. [L]ess involvement in consumer culture leads to healthier kids, and more involvement leads kids’ psychological well-being to deteriorate (167).

Similarly, Ryan quotes Michael Heim, who writes, “’Hypertext thinking may indeed reveal something about us that is agitated, panicky, or even pathological. As the mind jumps, the psyche gets jumpy or hyper’ (Metaphysics, 40)” (261). It’s not difficult to extend this argument to the Internet in general. How much is its jumpiness negatively affecting our mental well-being?

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Chapter 6 – From Immersion to Interactivity: The Text as World versus the Text as Game

Consider this short passage

“There’s glory for you! [said Humpty Dumpty.]
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” – Lewis Carroll

Ryan writes about the game of text. I like this quote in particular: “The idea of linguistic relativism is a seductive plaything for a thought that conceives itself as play. In the paradigm that currently dominates literary studies, if literature is a game, it is because language itself is one; and if language is a game, it is because its rules form a self-enclosed system that determines, rather than reflects, our experience of reality” (187).

I think that this is an important lesson for anyone in academia. Compare this to my previous rant about the Game of Academia…

Another takeaway from this chapter is the way in which the notion of authorship has evolved. Foucault writes in “What Is an Author?”: “Referring only to itself, but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game (jeu) that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits (120)” (190). Once writing became a game, it needed new creative ways of playing; e.g. Cubism. “According to Roland Barthes, reading is a ‘cubist’ exercise in which ‘the meanings are cubes, piled up, altered, juxtaposed, yet feeding on each other’” (191). And ultimately, the game has evolved to encourage participation: “The writerly, by contrast, is seen as promoting an active and playful participation of the reader in the act of writing: ‘Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text’ [Barthes]” (195-6). We can clearly see a path from here to hypertext…

So what is the point of this seeming tangent. I suppose I see it as yet another example of the ways in which our aesthetic and cultural values have led to and been incorporated in the Internet as it is now: a participatory space in which everyone is a creator.

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Interlude (I) – Virtual Realities of the Mind: Baudelaire, Huysmans, Coover
& Chapter 3 – The Text as World: Theories of Immersion
& Interlude (II) – The Discipline of Immersion: Ignatius of Loyola
& Chapter 4 – Presence of the Textual World: Spatial Immersion
& Chapter 5 – Immersive Paradoxes: Temporal and Emotional Immersion

Ryan writes about an interesting character called Ignatius of Loyola, who encouraged people to vividly visualize scenes from the Bible as a means of achieving a more immersive and spiritual experience: “The originality of the method resides in the idea that the involvement of the sense of the body – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – can be used as stepping stones toward the involvement of the two sense of the soul: the will and the intellect” (116). While this example may be seen as a case of religious rather than spiritual experience, the point is that immersion has the potential to be linked with spiritual engagement. As Ryan explains, “In the Spiritual Exercises the founder of the Jesuits produced a meticulous description of the mental operations that lead to immersion in a textual world” (115).

The point that Ryan makes so eloquently is that there is nothing wrong with immersion. Many people have criticized the vision of VR by arguing that immersion is dangerous to our frail psyches, as if we will lose all sense of reality. This is the tired old argument that people have used to protest against role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, which frankly I see no problem with. Furthermore, it seems to be a conflation of immersion and escapism, which are rather different. And I think that our use of the word “user” to describe people who engage with things like MUIs even further serves to pathologize the immersive experience, as if it is analogous to a “drug user.”

Anyway, on the contrary, immersion is – and always has been in painting, literature, television, etc. – a transcendent opportunity, one which may approach what, indeed, we mean by spiritual engagement. For example, “Baudelaire regards the artificial not as a copy that should make up for a lost original but as a way to overcome the terrifying chaos of organic life” (75). The more one becomes immersed in the experience, the greater this ability to overcome.

Ryan identifies 3 different kinds of immersion: “spatial immersion, the response to setting; temporal immersion, the response to plot; and emotional immersion, the response to character” (121). She quotes Marcel Proust who describes the experience of the latter:

[I found myself] giving more attention and tenderness to characters in books than to people in real life, not always daring to admit how much I loved them… those people, for whom I had panted and sobbed, and whom, at the close of the book, I would never see again, and no longer know anything about…. I would have wanted so much for these books to continue, and if that were impossible, to have other information on all those characters, to learn now something about their lives, to devote mine to things that might not be entirely foreign to the love they had inspired in me and whose object I was suddenly missing… beings who tomorrow would be but names on a forgotten page, in a book having no connection with life. – Marcel Proust (140).

(Immediately, I am reminded of the experience described by Turkle in her Life on the Screen.)

And for yet another example, the immersive potential of tragedy has long been recognized: “Ever since Aristotle defined the effect of tragedy as catharsis, or purification through terror and pity, it has been taken for granted that literary fictions can elicit the same spectrum of emotional reactions in the reader as real-life situations: empathy, sadness, relief, laughter, admiration, spite, fear, and even sexual arousal” (148).

And now the Internet creates greater opportunity for the kind of voyeurism that has always drawn us into narrative: “Whether or not we like to admit it, voyeurism has a lot to do with the pleasures we take in narrative fiction: where else but in a novel can we penetrate into the most guarded and the most fascinating of realms, the inner workings of a foreign consciousness” (149)? I do wonder though, if we would do well to get rid of some of the voyeuristic quality of Internet engagement and trade it for more profound opportunities for connection with people. In other words, I see Ryan’s point, but to the degree that we can avoid it, I’m not sure it’s worth emulating voyeurism in cyberspace as a means of designing immersive experiences; though I can kind of understand how we got to this point where voyeurism has become such a fundamental part of cyberspace.

Ryan explains other ways to create an immersive experience: “The depth of immersion – what Walton calls the richness of the game of make-believe – depends on the style of the representation as well as on the disposition of the reader” (110). (This dispositional factor is why a small few people may lose touch with reality when playing Dungeons and Dragons or playing MUIs.) But more specifically, “For immersion to take place, the text must offer an expanse to be immersed within, and this expanse, in a blatantly mixed metaphor, is not an ocean but a textual world” (90)…. ‘A world is not a collection of fragments, nor even an amalgam of pieces. It is a felt totality or whole’ [Michael Heim]” (91).

The question here is – assuming that immersion offers spiritual potential and is something to design for – whether there is any coherence in the current design of the Internet. There may be pockets of coherence. But I think that the democratic ideals of the Internet supersede any ambition of coherence, so that individual expression and creativity win the day. Is the result something incomprehensible to the point that it interferes with immersive – and spiritual – potential? I realize this is beginning to sound like I’m advocating totalitarian control over creative space… but I’m just musing over these questions.

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Chapter 2 – Virtual Reality as Dream and as Technology

Aldous Huxley wrote of the potential perils of multisensory art in his Brave New World, where characters experience The Feely, “that offered visual, auditive, olfactory, and tactile stimuli. The spectators could feel every hair of the rug on which the protagonists were making love, every jolt in the crash of a helicopter, and they were so fully absorbed in these sensations that they paid no attention to the silliness of the plot” (55). We can relate to this – it does seem like the logical extension of the VR dream, resulting in the death of the mind. But Ryan says, “Despite Huxley’s warning that multisensory art would extinguish critical sense and render the imagination obsolete, the idea has retained a powerful hold on the modern mind” (55).

So it is not the multisensory nature of VR that we should be wary of. To some degree, a good novel evokes sensations of touch, smell, etc.. But there is something we may want to consider in more depth: Ryan writes a lot in this chapter about the goal of virtual reality is to erase the medium while multiplying it – i.e. making the medium invisible (56): “The ‘virtual reality effect’ is the denial of the role of hardware and software (bits, pixels, and binary code) in the production of what the user experiences as unmediated presence” (57). In a sense, this is not unique to VR; for example, it is clearly the goal of interface design. As Ryan says, “‘Virtual reality’ is not just the ultimate medium, it is the ultimate interface metaphor” (58).

The question for me is, Are we duping ourselves out of a spiritual experience? This seems illusory and manipulative; and in erasing the medium, we make it more readily acceptable, thus the technology can increasingly creep into where it might otherwise have been objectionable. In a nutshell, this insidiousness is what irks me about Ubiquitous Computing (Mark Weiser’s vision of it, anyway). Before we know it, we may find that our hitherto spiritual spaces are being corrupted by the intrusion of technology cloaked in the invisibility of the perfect erasure of its medium-ness.

I was intrigued to learn that there have been people in the past who have considered the possibility for more spiritual representation within our communication. For example, “The mystics of ages past – such as Swedenborg, the esoteric philosopher of the eighteenth century – had a term for this radically antisemiotic mode of communication. They called it the ‘language of the angels’” (59); and, “Pierre Lévy… believes that the expressive potential of the computer will be better served by a graphic language that he calls ‘dynamic ideography’ than by alphanumeric symbols” (60). I agree in principle with this approach; i.e. I think that if one wants to design a spiritual object, technology, or experience, one needs to evaluate the ways in which the foundation of that object/technology/experience represent the essential spiritual principles one wishes to be present in the final product. But I think in terms of the Internet, we are far past the point of (what Lanier would call) “lock in,” and there is no way to change the symbols that we use to communicate in that space. The remaining options for us have to do with structural changes, meaning how that communication occurs, rather than its encryption.

Bearing this in mind, I found this quote particularly fascinating and poignant: “This VR relation to space is totally different from what we experience in the ‘cyberspace’ of the Internet. Cyberspace projects not a continuous territory but a relatively loose net made of links and nodes, of routes and destinations, with nothing in between. The destinations, or sites, may be centers of interest, but the connecting routes are not. Travel from site to site is not a voyage through a developing landscape but an instantaneous jump that negates the body, since material bodies can move through space only by traversing it one point at a time. The standard metaphor for cyberspace travel, surfing, gives a false impression of continuity” (73)…. In the nonspace of cyberspace, travel time is wasted time, since there is nothing to see between the nodes” (74).

This design embodies and in turn promotes a value set whereby speed, efficiency, and by extension profit, are at the top of the hierarchy. I think – though perhaps I’m not qualified to say so – that engagement with technology that emanates these values slowly and subconsciously affects our ability to appreciate alternative values. In other words, the more we engage with technology where the journey is a distraction and a hindrance, is it getting harder for us to enjoy the journey in other areas of our lives? My point is, there must be a more spiritual design alternative that could promote a difference set of values. How can we make it look like this – Ryan’s – vision?: “It would not matter where we ended; the pleasure would be the ride itself, the experience of being carried away by a smooth but mighty force” (74).

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Chapter 1 – The Two (and Thousand) Faces of the Virtual

In this chapter, Ryan explicates the difference between virtual as illusion (drawing on Baudrillard) and virtual as potential (drawing on Lévy).

Baudrillard’s term was “simulacrum”, which as explained by Ryan, “is not the dynamic image of an active process, as are computer simulations, but a mechanically produced, and therefore passively obtained, duplication whose only function is to pass as that which it is not: ‘To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have’…. Baudrillard envisions contemporary culture as a fatal attraction toward simulacra” (29). This seems to jive with Lanier’s criticism of the goal of VR (which I think he later abandoned for his own attraction to the simulacra of even cooler VR technology). We do seem drawn to things-that-are-like-other-things. But this has always been the case, Ryan points out. It is not unique to the technological age, though it may be enabled to a greater degree by it.

For Baudrillard, this fatal attraction represented a threat: “With the Virtual, we enter not only upon the era of the liquidation of the Real and Referential, but that of the extermination of the Other. / It is the equivalent of an ethnic cleansing which would not just affect particular populations but unrelentingly pursue all forms of otherness. / The otherness… / Of the world – dispelled by Virtual Reality. (Perfect Crime, 109)” (30). But one could critique this by arguing that all thinking activity requires an act of simulacrum: “…meaning is a rational simulacrum of things. Disarming the other of its otherness by representing it and building ‘realities’ as worlds to inhabit are one and the same thing. It is simply thinking” (35). Furthermore, simulacrum is an integral component of mystical or spiritual experience: “We know that this ‘other’ real exists, and often we butt into it, but we do not live in it, except perhaps in some moments of thoroughly private and nearly mystical experience, because the human mind is an indefatigable fabricator of meaning, and meaning is a rational simulacrum of things” (35).

But Baudrillard hits upon the same Foucauldian criticism of the illusory nature of our freedom, this time made possible by the mesmerizing nature of simulacrum: “…it is a simulacrum of activity that conceals the fundamental passivity of the user, just as the world outside prisons is for Baudrillard a simulacrum of freedom that conceals the fundamentally carceral nature of society (‘Precession,’ 12)” (31). And furthermore, the more insidious effect of simulacra is the way they disempower us by causing us to become disillusioned by the whole world: “[Baurdillard:] ’The illusion of the world… is volatilized in psychosensorial telereality, in all these sophisticated technologies which transfer us to the virtual, to the contrary of illusion: to radical disillusion. (27)’”

Over time, Baudrillard began to use the terms simulacra and virtual reality interchangeably. Meanwhile, on the other hand, there is a more cheery understanding of the virtual posited by Lévy. He argues instead that virtual reality does not in any way weaken the real: [Lévy, Qu’est-ce que le virtuel] “The virtual is by no means the opposite of the real. On the contrary, it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical presence. (16)” (35)

Ryan’s point is not a judgment about the relative merits of either view of virtual reality so much as it is that we have always done it: “In our dealing with the virtual, we are doing what mankind has always done, only more powerfully, consciously, and systematically…. If we live a ‘virtual condition,’ as N. Katherine Hayles has suggested (How We Became Posthuman, 18), it is not because we are condemned to the fake but because we have learned to live, work, and play with the fluid, the open, the potential” (37). This, she suggests, derives from a linguistic imperative: “Language originates in a similar need to transcend the particular. The creation of a system of reusable linguistic types (or langue) our of an individual or communal experience of the world is a virtualizing process of generalization and conceptualization” (38). In other words, language itself is virtualization of a kind. So is music: “The effect of music, according to Langer, is to create a ‘virtual time’ that differs from what may be called ‘clock-time’ or ‘objective time’ in that it gives form to the succession of moments and turns its own passing – transfigured as durée – into sensory perception” (42-3). So are novels. So is television. Etc..

I hasten to add that while I think it is important for us to realize that virtualization is not unique to our time, we cannot lose sight of what is unique about our time, namely the increasing value of knowledge in our society (38) and the specific way in which we have designed our virtualizations to match our evolving worldview, i.e. the Internet as it is now. To say that we have always – and will always – virtualize our world is not to say that the Internet as it exists now is inevitable, or in other words, that our Internet takes an inevitable form.

The spirit of this book is very similar to Wertheim’s, and Ryan has drawn significantly from Wertheim’s work. But she fills in a gap ignored by Wertheim, i.e. the birth of the novel as a new kind of space: “As a real object inscribed in space and time, the work of art is in the world, but as a virtual object that creates its own space and time, it is not of the world” (42). The transformation of the novel provides insight into the changing worldview of which it is a part, and therefore its expressions (I might say ‘symptoms’) are the same with those of technology. For example, our worldview precludes why questions; we design technologies because we can, and we create texts because we can: “The attitude promoted by the electronic reading machine is no longer ‘What should I do with texts?’ but ‘What can I do with them’” (47)? And just as Carr argues that the Internet is turning us into ‘pancake people’, Ryan argues that, “The reader produced by the electronic reading machine will therefore be more inclined to graze at the surface of texts than to immerse himself in a textual world or to probe the mind of an author…. The non-holistic mode encouraged by the electronic reading machine tends to polarize the attitude of the reader in two directions: reading becomes much more utilitarian, or much more serendipitous, depending on whether the user treats the textual database as what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) call a striated space, to be traversed to get somewhere, or as a smooth space, to be explored for the pleasure of the journey and for the discoveries to be made along the way” (47). Our weakness is being our inability to construct holistic meaning; and our cherished value is more and more becoming getting somewhere as fast as possible.

Sometimes it’s easier to come at the problem from another angle. It’s difficult to see the technological mindset because it appears invisible as “second nature.” One way to defamiliarize this thinking is to look to other areas that may shed light on this mindset. The reason I find this book helpful is because I can use trends in art and literature as windows into our technological thinking. Ultimately, this is the approach I plan to take in the PhD, drawing on all sorts of art theory.