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The Otherness of Cyberspace, Virtual Reality, and Hypertext

2010; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5772/13718

1434-9957

Tugrul Ilter,

Digital Media and Philosophy

The techno-cultural developments that are globally re-weaving us within satellite communication networks, the Internet, and the world wide web have also given us cyberspace, virtual reality, and hyper-text as fabrics of culture-space-reality interaction. Coupled with an exponential growth in technological advances has been a similar mushrooming of cultural fantasies about altogether different futures. The adjectives cyber, virtual, and hyper are meant to serve as the markers of this altogether different future, its different and other space/reality/textile. Even a traditional, calendarical distinction like a new millennium is infused with a magical substance by such references. We were excited about, and also scared from, the millennium because it was supposed to mark the passage from the repetitive and familiar traditions and constraints or securities of the old to the new of this altogether different future. The reactions engendered by this excitement are Janus-faced, or, for those who are more familiar with the Batman mythology, two-faced, like the character played by Tommy Lee Jones who is called, simply, Two-Face, in the movie Batman Forever. Like another famous literary character, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde, Two-Face has both an evil and a good “face,” and decides to do good or bad based upon the result of a coin flip. Similarly, our reactions to these developments are two-faced and contradictory in that we are both excited and scared, we lay out the welcome mat and start building and reinforcing the retaining wall, we feel both attracted and repulsed towards these developments. In the vast orientalist literature, for instance, the Orient is depicted both as an uncivilized, backward place ruled by despotic rulers, lacking freedom, and whose characteristics are the very opposite of what “we” in the West value and uphold, and yet also as an exotic place of attraction, attractive in its exoticism, both sexualized and found sexually attractive, where one can indulge beyond the reach of the restraints back “home” (See Fig. 1). There is something of the unknown about them which triggers these reactions. Like the terra incognita of the Europeans during the “Age of Conquest and Discovery,” cyberspace, virtual reality, and hypertext represent, in one of their guises, the freedom to break from the restraints of “our” known world, the source of much excitement. I find it significant that a very important US “civil liberties group defending [our] rights in the digital world” is called the “Electronic Frontier Foundation.” The reference here is, of course, to the rapidly expanding