“Virtual” means what appears to be real, but is not, but “may have the same effects... it attests to the possibility that seeing and being might be confused, but that the confusion might not matter in the end… this sense of the virtual arises from a complex history of relations between reality, appearance and goodness. The roots of ‘virtuality’ are in ‘virtue’ (or truthfulness), and therefore in both power and morality.” The oldest roots of “virtual” are in a religious worldviews in which “power and moral goodness are united in virtue.” And the characteristic of the virtual is that it is able to produce effects, or to “produce itself as an effect even in the absence of the ‘real effect.’” This confusion of boundaries suggests that “technologies of the virtual are destined not only to simulate the real, but replace it,” (Porter 1997 9-10) also described by Baudrillard as the virtual replacing the real with what is “more real than real.”
Stacy Horn created the Echo virtual community in 1989, a “Bizarro ‘Our Town.’” His book Cyberville is a description of this community as a real, vital space located away from the mainstream AOL and Compuserve “malls,” where “If you like the place, you either resolve the conflicts or learn to live with them. Online, we rediscover how societies are built and how they hold together. Every virtual community has its town cranks and drunks, psychos and saints, good girls, bad girls, good guys, bad guys -- if it’s out there, it’s in here” (Horn 1998: 9-10). He describes his community as distinct, as are others like the WELL, and notes that while members of one group may visit another, they tend to stay in the group that makes them the most comfortable, and they are very faithful subscribers.
He notes, tellingly for the whole of cyberspace, that “the first thing we do when we get online is recreate the world as we have always known it” (Horn 1998: 10). Echo is unique in being a local service, so subscribers often get together offline, and this makes for a stronger cybercommunity.
John Barlow talks about the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) for Deadheads in the late 80s, a place where thousands of “Deadheads in community” were “gossiping, complaining, comforting and harassing each other, bartering, engaging in religion, beginning and ending love affairs, praying for one another’s sick kids. There was, it seemed, everything one might find going on in a small town, save dragging Main Street and making out on the back roads” (1998: 165).
As vital as this community seemed, being rooted in the real phenomenon that is the Deadhead community, Barlow found there to be a lot missing, prãnã (Sanscrit for breath and spirit) being one. He describes prãnã as “the literally vital element in the body and unseen ecology of relationship, the dense mesh of invisible life, on whose surface carbon-based life floats like a thin film.” He lists other missing things as “body language, sex, death, tone of voice, clothing, appearance, weather, violence, vegetation, wildlife, pets, architecture, music, smells, sunlight, and that good ‘ol harvest moon. In short, most of the things that make life real to me” (1998: 166).
Horn argues back: “If there is no prãnã in cyberspace, where does it go? I don’t feel as if I am having an out-of-body experience when I’m online… here I am online, goodbye prãnã … At what point was I separated from my prãnã?”. There is no “here’s real life and here is virtual life” or here is prãnã and here is no-prãnã. “Cyberspace exists in the connections. Between people. Who have life and prãnã… It takes time, what is exchanged online: the lives that meet, cross, connect, explode, the loves, the babies where there were no babies, the friendships, jobs, companies -- where is prãnã, where is prãnã not? I tell you, cyberspace is packed with prãnã” (Horn 1998: 46).
Above cited from Patterson 2005.
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