There’s a lot said and written on immersion into alternative or even virtual worlds, on people getting lost in gamespace or the Internet’s interactive realms, and so on. In consequence thoughts about the questions arising with these ‘other realities’ fly into every direction. As the ‘cyberanthropologist online among the gamemodders’ I deem myself to be, I am especially interested in how the Cyberians themselves tackle this issues. The people I am affected to appropriate all kinds of related artefacts and then artistically slap the demarcations between meat- and cyberspace around with a large trout—big time. Aaron Rasmussen for example thought … Continue reading
Daily Archives: Thursday, 29th September 2005
Reply
At the ↵Cyberspace 2005 Conference I will give a little talk. Here’s the abstract: The lack of a suitable understanding of reality experienced by human beings hampers the discourse on social and cultural phenoma triggered by information and communication technologies (ICTs). This lack generates misunderstandings which accumulate in the notion of ICT-induced realms as a Gegenwelt, either in the form of an utopia or dystopia. The majority of the studies so far on the subject suffer from an utter lack of clarity of the discourse’s ever-resurfacing core-concepts “virtual reality” (VR), “cyberspace”, and “virtual community”. In fact, throughout the literature a … Continue reading