Emerging World [part one]
Virtuality
In the process of demonstrating the tradition of the virtual as a persistent “component of the human mind,” Pierre Lévy finishes the second chapter of his book Becoming Virtual as follows:
“My own body is the temporary actualization of an enormous hybrid, social, and technobiological hyperbody. The contemporary body resembles a flame. It is often tiny, isolated, separated, nearly motionless. Later, it moves outside itself, intensified by sports or drugs, is transmitted by means of a satellite, launches a virtual arm high in the air, flows through medical or communications networks. It entwines itself with the public body and burns with the same heat, shines with the same light as other body flames. It then returns, transformed, to its quasi-private sphere, and continues thus, sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes alone with others. One day, it will detach itself completely from the hyperbody and vanish.”
Perhaps the days in which we are able to completely detach our virtual entity from the real thing (hyperbody) are not too far away. Lévy reminds us that the virtual has been with us for a long time: since the invention of tools that (virtually) extend body parts; mass media that create a collective eye, allowing us to experience the same event in a detached, collective manner; telephones that let us be here and there through extending our voice; and the more sophisticated virtual reality, so popular in the nineties when Becoming Virtual was published.
Since 2003, the virtual has a new expression in the form of Linden Lab’s Second Life. Free from the constrain of traditional massive multiplayer online 3D web games (that is, of being a “game”), Second Life (SL) virtualizes the economy, education, consumerism, flirting, vanity, experimentation, and the very basics of social interaction.
Pierre Lévy, back in 1998, was preparing us to accept a virtual space like SL on the grounds that we are, by nature, already virtual. That would explain the tremendous adoption rate of this technology/service, which grew from 920,000 to over one million members since last Monday. Way faster than the growth rate of 20% forecasted by The Economist last week.
Second Life is developing into something bigger than anything we have seen in the media space. It has the potential to aggregate all the technological features that make the Internet so practical, social, entertaining, multimedia, democratic, and most importantly, useful to hundreds of millions; and fuse them with an intuitive, easy-to-use, 3D interface that amplifies reality, adding an element of thrill and discovery to the equation.
