Virtual Reality, Both Social and Physical, and the Significance of Narrative Construction

Digital technology provides an opportunity for us to reshape and rethink our world by providing us with alternatives. Establishing virtual realities provides us with a possible reality which we can shape and mold to our choosing.

Randall B. Smith, in “Experiences with the Alternate Reality Kit,” discusses the virtual reality of a computer program in terms of how the program exists as a metaphor for reality. Smith explains that virtual reality has two dimensions particular to it, literalism and magic. The “literalism” of virtual reality, however, is only the degree to which the actions taken by the program or the user of the program correspond to the metaphor established by the programmer. The “magic” is the malleability of the program, the ability of the user to shape the virtual environment.

While the Alternate Reality Kit (ARK) was still sort of early in the development of the digital computer interface, the basic ideas are still thought provoking. Now that people are socialized to interaction with computers and computer interfaces are standardized (I was taught to use computers all throughout elementary school), the surprise Smith refers to may not be very common among most adults, and even children as young as eight or nine are probably used to intuiting how the computer interface functions. However, the ease of basic commands and uses of the computer means that more complex functions come more naturally.

Underberg and Congdon’s piece on the website Folkvine.org explores how social realities can be created, or replicated, and shaped on the internet. They discuss how local folk culture had been chosen for representation on a community “documentary project.” An important dimension to this project is how social and cultural reality is particularly revealed to be malleable and how, on the internet, there is a capacity to shape and mold social reality, similar to how the Alternate Reality Kit that Smith discusses can shape and mold a virtual physical reality.

Placing social reality in these malleable terms creates room for more focused methodological criticisms that might remain vague in strictly textually based discourse like academic journals, and also opens the door for new ways to examine social reality, similar to Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments. The page-by-page juxtaposition and arrangement of different cultural and social artifacts like folk art and discussion creates a strange new context in which to perceive them. The way these social worlds are arranged, apparently in the attempt of providing a concise illustration of them, may also distort the narrative of the worlds or decontextualize them, or also bring to the surface elements not so easily available to someone who encounters them normally.

Lev Manovich, in “What is Digital Cinema,” appears to concerned with something along these lines. Manovich wants to explore how digital cinema can capture reality in different terms than traditional cinema. He explains “spatial montage” as a technique where, instead of simply picking and choosing certain moments to be captured, all moments exist together on the screen. Rather than a strictly linear temporal model of cinema, where moments are captured regardless of where they are, all moments exist simultaneously at different points on the screen. This would allow the construction of a narrative that is not developed just in terms of a sequence of events, but a sequence of events in the now visible context of space.

A Matter of Liberty: Second Life Response for 2/25/08

The Free Software movement is concerned with the availability and accessibility of technology to anyone who might desire to work with it and modify it or use it to his or her own needs, even if they go beyond the intended uses of the technology. They recognize the pervasive nature of technology, how it has become an intrinsic part of many people’s lives, and see the attempted regulation of the internet and other computer technologies as an attack on our basic human liberties and equate the freedom of software to the freedom of speech.

Second Life can be seen as a sort of theoretical arena where those with heavy concerns about the connection and relationship between life and free software can try to imagine and experiment with their ideas. However, it might be less of a place where software integrates with life as much as a place where life integrates and interacts with software. The distinction being that, while whatever is coded in Second Life does not have immediate effects with real life, we can explore social possibilities and implications of new technologies in Second Life.