Page 247 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

VIRTUALITY

others, virtual communities are problematic substitutes for face-to-face
communication. Lack of accountability and the facelessness of
individuals within virtual communities can lead to practices that
may not be risked within the norms of real face-to-face social
relationships. In this way, virtual communities have raised the question
of whether a stable and constant identity is a necessary or desirable
requirement for community participation (Smith and Kollock, 1999).
The Internet may provide newpossibilities for communication but it
is not separate from other aspects of people’s social life, work and
community activities. People bring experiences and attitudes gained
from face-to-face communication to their virtual communities.
Hierarchies and prejudices are mostly reproduced online rather than
resolved. As with communities that are constituted through face-to-face
communication, virtual communities can be closed, insular, funda-
mentalist and motivated by hate. Virtual communities are not implicitly
positive.
However, as Avital Ronell has pointed out, virtual communities
have led to a rethinking of the conditions necessary to create
community: ‘In the absence of the polis, something like VR [virtual
reality] obligates us to pose ethical questions about contact, memory,
the prosthetic subject, and it teaches us to dislocate our proper place’
(1996: 126). Virtual communitarians contribute to the established
body of community theory by demonstrating that community is not
tied to geographic locations but can exist through mediated
communication.

See also: Cyberdemocracy, Cyborg, Internet

VIRTUALITY

Virtuality is a cyborg phenomenon, experienced by the individual
whose identity is extended or manipulated through her/his interaction
with technology. Underlying the concept of virtuality is the
presumption that technology can take us out of ourselves, allowus
to create a newidentity by manipulating information and allow us to
wander through landscapes that are divorced from the material reality
that we usually inhabit.
A standard definition of virtual reality is ‘interactive graphic
simulations’ (McKie, 1994). However, virtuality has been defined by
Hayles (1999: 69) as ‘the cultural perception that material objects are
interpenetrated by information patterns’. This complex definition is

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