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Villemard
"Dictant son courrier" [Dictating His Mail]
Visions de l'an 2000, 1910
Chromolithograph
BNF, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie*How has the notion of one's self or identity, one's self in relation to others, what we consider reality, and consequently what we consider a utopia changed with the advent of the Internet? What does it mean in a larger context to have a virtual existence?
Benjamin Barber (Rutgers University)
It doesn't really mean anything to speak of having a virtual existence, since virtuality is a form of non-being. We no more exist on the Net than we exist in holographic projections of ourselves. We are our bodies first and last, and anything we are that is more than our bodies (perhaps quite a lot) derives from what we are in our bodies. The Internet reintroduces that polarizing and Manichean dualism of body and spirit that nearly wrecked Christianity. Perhaps, this time, it will succeed in wrecking democratic civilization.
Francesco Battisti (University of Cassino)
With the advent of the Internet and more complex virtual reality simulations, interfaced with other technological devices, man has become capable of manipulating objects in unreachable environments, such as underground, underwater, within the human body, out in space, etc. However, virtual reality comes out of existence, but cannot replace it. People are very well aware of it, even though they might accept the fiction of getting into a virtual role. This is so true that no mother would content herself with a virtual baby.
Robert Fogarty (Antioch College)
The Internet exalts our capacity and, at the same, restrains our imagination because its proponents overstate its power. The Internet is no match for the world that exists within people or for their capacity for imagination. A real existence is always better than a virtual one.
James Gunn (University of Kansas)
The Internet brings us one step closer to virtual identities, but major obstacles to downloading ourselves remain.
Naomi Jacobs (University of Maine)
My own use of the Internet to communicate with others is largely indistinguishable (except for its speed) from my use of that older technology, letters. Just like snail-mail, e-mail can help us to develop and enrich intimate friendships. Both media also allow for a certain fictionalizing or stage-managing in the presentation of self, e-mail more so because of its anonymity. However, I haven't experimented with the creation of an online identity distinct from the multivalent but integrated self I aspire to present in person. The delayed response time and banality of chat rooms annoy me, games generally bore me, and I don't like sitting at the computer all that much. Maybe if I had a better computer I'd find virtual reality more compelling! I know that many people find the Internet an exciting means for exploring alternate selves or for freeing themselves from aspects of their material selves, such as disabilities, that hinder their relationships with others outside of the virtual context. Personally, I could not be satisfied with a self or with relationships existing solely in the virtual realm.
Ruth Levitas (University of Bristol)
I don’t think the impact of the Internet should be overstated here. Most people, I think, are still embedded in real relationships and interactions. The possibility of virtual existence is a supplementary luxury for those whose actual existence is reasonably comfortable or secure; it’s an indulgence. It’s true that in pockets of affluent late modern culture, there is much more of a sense of the contingency of self, a sense that one might be otherwise. The Internet allows experimentation with this, an arena in which you can pretend to be other. But presumably most people still regard their direct relationships as more ‘real’ and fundamental to their self and identity than their virtual ones. I hope so. In this sense, though, the Internet may encourage utopian thinking because it encourages playing with the idea that things don’t have to be this way.
Elizabeth McCutcheon (University of Hawaii)
To me, a virtual existence is not the same as an actual one. I think there is a great danger in confusing the two - of confusing fiction with actuality. Perhaps I am hopelessly realistic, and not post-modern, but to me there is a fundamental difference between a virtual birth and an actual one; a virtual death, and a real one. Early modern Europe wrestled with this and related questions, incidentally; I'm thinking here of Ralegh's poem, written close to his execution, where he reflected upon the difference between play-acting and actually dying.
Raymond Polin (St. John's University)
We are still largely as we were before. So far, I see no revolutionary change in the notion of one's self or identity or how we treat others. There has been undeniably significant change in the ease and speed with which we can communicate with others everywhere and how we can sometimes successfully gather needed or desired information or order material items or request services; but this involves mostly the mechanics of the system – which thus far produces too many glitches, too often gives absurdly irrelevant responses, and is often much too user-unfriendly, probably because of insufficient consumer testing and user input because technicians with too much arrogance and too little common sense have too much control over design, operation, and the opacity or omission of information (and lately even of hard-copy manuals) for the user. Such inadequacies of the Internet regularly jar us into awareness of the frustration that is part of real life; so, so far few of us are in danger of more than occasional lapses into an alternative virtual reality or uncontrollable substitution of Internet contacts for real-world associates. But with or without the Internet, there is some of Walter Mitty in all of us; and all of us spend part of waking as well as sleeping time in a make-believe world we each make for ourselves – no matter how fulfilled and happy we may be with ourselves, our mates, our families, our careers, and our reputation. With or without the Internet we shall always fantasize somewhat and want more and better for ourselves and loved ones. Thus, so far the Internet has not generally substituted its virtual reality for our real-world reality; – but I worry somewhat about its potential to reinforce or introduce untruths, especially when I find more inaccuracies (even under prestigious university sponsorship) and also purposeful alterations than in the printed originals. It often gives us pablumized matter instead of authenticity.
Kenneth Roemer (University of Texas at Arlington)
Certainly virtual reality has dramatically expanded the space, speed, and potential access of the process of utopian speculation. In my classes we examine websites from around the world.
Dan Sabia (University of South Carolina)
Thinking about the Internet has without question helped destabilize conventional conceptions of reality, identity, self and so on, but not, as far as I can see, in any radically novel way. Notions like the existence of multiple and pliable identities and the social construction of reality more broadly are hardly new to social scientists and novelists, while the contention that reality is not to be confused with mere matter and may take many forms is, for instance, as old as religion and philosophy. I fear that a preoccupation with virtual identities, existence, communities and the like will promote alienating forms of consciousness and existence.
Lyman Sargent (University of Missouri at St. Louis)
Virtual identities are either the projection of the person as he or she perceives him or her self (correctly or incorrectly) or the deliberate falsification of themselves. The falsification can be as a means of preying on other people (as with the pedophiles who use the Internet to contact children by pretending to be children themselves), or it can be acting out a fantasy. Fantasy in this sense can be positive if it allows for the expression of an aspect of oneself, but the fantasy can also take over and come to dominate one’s life. The isolation of the Internet seems to me to make the latter more likely.
Brian Stableford (Freelance Writer)
To the limited extent that the hoary sociological maxim that "the self is a social product" is neither trivial nor false, the selves people construct in producing the narratives of our lives are bound to take aboard and reflect social relationships created and sustained on-line, just as they formerly took aboard relationships created and sustained by literacy, the telephone, etc, etc. One could argue that all mental experience is a kind of virtual existence, and that the ability to read is of far greater importance in that context than the extension of that ability to embrace website-based information, e-mail and on-line chat.
Darko Suvin (McGill University)
A whole long discourse is implied here about real changes in subject positions in the last 100 years. It is a complex discourse, for those changes intimately meld good aspects (for example, loss of the stiff, anal-retentive, unchanging Self) and bad (for example, loss of capacity for flexible action). The Internet may be, for the minority of people on the planet who use it, a magnifier of both the good and the bad. For the rest, I must respectfully refer you to my previous answer and my other, much more voluminous writings: "The Subject as a Limit-Zone of Collective Bodies (Bakhtin, Hobbes, Freud, Foucault, and Counting)" (1989); "Introduction to the 'Non-Cartesian Subjects' Issue" and "Polity or Disaster: From Individualist Self Toward Personal Valences and Collective Subjects" (1994); and "System" and "Horizon (Utopian)" (2000).
Wilhelm Vosskamp (University of Cologne)
Virtual existence is a sort of alternative to real life. The problem will be to stabilize personal identity in the horizon of virtual worlds.
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Please note: The views expressed on this page are those of the named individuals, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The New York Public Library.
In the ongoing search for the ideal society, the Internet has been proposed as a "place" in which a utopia could exist. Parallels to previous notions of utopian thought are discussed in "Cyber-Utopianism" and the Evolution in Utopian Thought.
*The New York Public Library provides the information contained on this website, including reproductions of certain items from other institutions, for personal or research use only. Contact the Bibliothèque nationale de France for additional guidelines regarding this image.
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