The culture of simulation may help us achieve a vision of a multiple but integrated identity whose flexibility, resilience and capacity for joy comes from having access to our many selves. But if we have lost reality in the process, we shall have struck a poor bargain.
Virtual communities offer a dramatic new context in which to think about human identity in the age of the Internet. They are spaces for learning about the lived meaning of a culture of simulation. Will it be a separate world where people get lost in the surfaces, or will we learn to see how the real and virtual can be made permeable, each having the potential for enriching and expanding the other?
We have seen the computer as a tool, as mirror, and as gateway to a world through the looking glass of the screen. In each of these domains, we are experiencing a complex interweaving of modern and postmodern, calculation and stimulation … As people have become more and more comfortable psychologizing computers and have come to grant them a certain capacity for intelligence, the boundary dispute between people and machines now falls on the question of life.
Virtual spaces may provide the safety for us to expose what we are missing so that we can begin to accept ourselves as we are. Virtuality need not be a prison. It can be the raft, the ladder, the transitional space, the moratorium, that is discarded after reaching greater freedom. We don’t have to reject life on the screen, but we don’t have to treat it as an alternative life either. We can use it as a space for growth … Like the anthropologist returning home from a foreign culture, the voyager in virtuality can return to a real world better equipped to understand its artifices.
What if my virtual apartment is destroyed…? What if you kidnap my virtual dog … what if you destroy him and leave his dismembered body in the MUD? In the physically embodied world, we have no choice but to assume responsibility for our body’s actions … The possibilities inherent in virtual reality, on the other hand, may provide some people with an excuse for irresponsibility, just as they may enable creative expressions that would otherwise have been repressed … The challenge is to integrate some meaningful personal responsibility in virtual environments. Virtual environments are valuable as places where we can acknowledge our inner diversity.
In the 19th century, utopians built communities in which political thought could be lived out as practice. On the cusp of the 21st century, we are building MUDs, possible worlds that can provoke a new critical discourse about the real.
What are the social implications of spinning off virtual personae that can run around with names and genders of our choosing, unhindered by the weight and physicality of embodiment? From their earliest days, MUDs have been evocative objects for thinking about virtuality and accountability.
I don’t think anyone would have said that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were addicted to the Agora. The computer nets are the modern Agora, serving a role similar to talk radio and tabloid journalism, but with more participation, less sensationalism, and more thinking between remarks.
Do MUDs oblige us to find a new language that does not judge virtual experiences purely in terms of how far they facilitate or encumber “real” ones? Perhaps the virtual experiences are “real enough.”
Searching for an easy fix, we are eager to believe that the Internet will provide an effective substitute for face-to-face interaction. But the move toward virtuality tends to skew our experience of the real in several ways. One way is to make denatured and artificial experiences seem real. Let’s call it the Disneyland effect … Another effect of stimulation, which I’ll call the artificial crocodile effect, makes the fake seem more compelling than the real … A third effect is that a virtual experience may be so compelling that we believe that within it we’ve achieved more than we have …To the question, “Why must virtuality and real life compete – why can’t we have both?” the answer is of course that we will have both. The more important question is, “How can we get the best of both?”