The more time I spend interacting in the nodal time of cyberspace, the more I find myself wondering… how are the countless hours that I spend viewing the world through the electronic lens of my computer screen, colonizing my personal relationships and altering my cultural head-space?
My monitor has become a kind of electro-magnetic relationship portal; overlaying its optical and auditory display onto my physical reality. Replacing actions, conversations and journeys, that once took place in real-space and time, with virtualized, decentralized, telepresent ones.
A large portion of my interactions are facilitated and managed via software of one kind or another. Many with people I have only a tangential and ephemeral acquaintance with in the real-world. When I ‘meet’ with my virtual friends, I never actually leave my home to do so. I ‘arrive’ without making any significant physical journey. Departure and arrival are merged, becoming a kind of near-instantaneous partial arrival.
Once ‘there’, our mutual shared references are somewhat supersensible and psychic rather than tactile and concrete. Our communication is mediated by the architecture of whichever virtual construct we happen to be interacting in. We approximate closeness, yet we simultaneously remain at a distance. There is a kind of sensory shrinkage involved in all of this. Certain essential material components are removed and in a very real sense, the material world is diminished, forced to fit its multi-dimensional, geophysical complexity, into the confines of an LCD display.
I realized recently, that I couldn’t definitively identify many of my virtual colleagues by their appearance if asked. Their faces are blurred behind a distorting lens of profile-photos, often several years younger and several pounds lighter. I don’t know where many of them actually live beyond a generalized geographic location. In certain ways, I know more about the man in my local shop, than I do about many of the people I call my friends online.
As a species, we seek to accelerate beyond what we perceive as apparent the chronocentric and geographic limitations of our lives. Yet there are dangers here as well as opportunities. I have no doubt that as our technology improves, so will our ability to mimic the conventions of our physical reality in all of its minor details.
So what is ‘true’ about relationships where there is almost no sense of actual proximal interrelatedness? Where is our shared sense of the physical, when our meeting places are electronic consensual hallucinations, rather than fixed physical locations. When I can arrive without leaving and mimic with software algorithms the gestural, facial, or tactile interactions that would in the real-world lead you to trust me – how much harder will it become to determine what is genuine and what is technology?
