The concept of "Virtual Reality" became for many synonomous with CMC. The images of "Virtual Reality" we are given are often from video games (where much of the marketing punch for the technology exists right now). It is therefore often characterized as a "fantasy world"; a "simulated world" that could draw us further away from the "real"; or "reality" without the virtual. I will explore in this review of the literature some of the ideas we have about "virtual"
If the key concept or reality about which I am writing is that of community, then it makes sense that my review of the literature relevant to theology and Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) gives significant attention to Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community. When it was published in 1993, it served as a springboard for a great debate about the pitfalls and possibilities of CMC; whether "Virtual Community" was in fact, any kind of community, and whether there is much social or relational value to going online.
Some writers and intellectuals began sounding warnings about "The Digital Age". They warned us not to be deceived by the promises of a technological utopia. (Good advice, I think). They also set out to construct arguments against the cultural values of online communications and relationships. While some have limited their warnings to the social and political consequences of a culture increasingly dependent upon computers, others have taken issue also with the legitimacy of online relationships and the notion of online communities.
The realities which Rheingold wrote about, however, seemed to be of much more substance than the impressions we were given by the media of "jacked in" cyberpunks and "wired cyborgs" of the kind Mark Dery covered in his treatise of Cyberculture, Escape Velocity. Dery's book provides a broad coverage of many of the "counter-cultural" approaches some have taken in their use of, and hopes for, a CMC-oriented society.
I also feel it is important that in the Internet, and in the World Wide Web in particular, we have a whole new kind of text; a new kind of "book". It seems that there are many critics of CMC who glorify the book, and seem to identify it with the best of the human mind. It is understandable. After all, most of us grew up with books. I love books. I buy more of them now than I ever did. As Cliff Stoll is wont to point out (only far too often), a book is easy to carry around, curl up in bed with, and make highlights or notes in the margin. But the book has existed in but a small portion of human history (but in a larger part of "written history"). As the human being and the technologies around us evolve, so will and has, the written forms of communication.
I am no computer nerd. That too, can become quite a stereotype, but I don't fit the conventional type anyway. I am deeply into sports, both participating and spectating, love the out of doors, love the cinema, and cannot type at any speed worthy of being called acceptable (but because of this medium , I keep trying). But I am nevertheless what some would call a computer enthusiast at best, and a techno-utopian at worst.
I am enthused by the possibilities of this medium, and I love to read about possibilities, and so some of my favorite writers are categorized as cyber-utopians; perhaps even considered "evangelists" or priests for a kind of "digital nirvana" .