Page 248 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

VIRTUALITY

intended to illustrate the fact that virtuality as a concept depends upon
the cultural construction of a binary opposition between information
and materiality.
As a result of this conceptual distinction, information is something
separate from the material world that may one day allow us to
transcend it. Sci-fi fantasies of being able to take on a newbody, or
to rematerialise in a different place (‘beam me up Scottie’) are an
expression of this cultural assumption/ideal. This historical con-
struction has resulted in the cultural perception that computer media
are ‘disembodying’ technologies. Hayles traces the creation of this
binary opposition back to communication theory and Shannon’s
assertion that the information has no content or necessary
connection with meaning in itself, that only when it is encoded in
a signal for transmission does it take on a material form (Shannon
and Weaver, 1949). With information decontextualised, it can be cast
as promising to take us beyond the physical world, hinting at the
possibility of immortality. Not unlike the traditional spirit–body
distinction of religious belief, that sees an essence beyond physical
presence, virtuality is a belief that it is possible to exist beyond the
body.
However, virtuality is not a physical fact but a rhetorical
accomplishment. Richard Doyle’s analysis of DNA as the ‘rhetorical
software’ of the human body serves as an example. Following
scientific discourse, it was long considered (and still is in non-
scientific circles) that the gene contained the original information that
produced the body, despite the fact that the body contains the gene
and not the other way around. This ‘impossible inversion’ is similar to
the dichotomy between information and materiality that is created
through discourses on virtual reality (Hayles, 1999). To believe that
computers are capable of removing us from the material world is to
deny the fact that information and materiality are not mutually
exclusive.
In fact, information depends upon the material world for its
distribution and use. Here, the rhetorical disembodiment of virtuality
takes a different form, invoking the ‘weightlessness’ of the new
economy, where intangibles rule the roost.
See also: Cyborg, Virtualcommunities

Further reading: Rheingold (1992); Stone (2001); Wark (1994)

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