Essay on Virtual Reality
As referenced in Week 4’s synchronous session, William Gibson has been quoted as stating that “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed” (2003). What does Gibson mean? Gibson may be commenting on how different classes of people have varying degrees of access to technology — with rich people having access to the latest technologies that might extend their lives or simply make their lives easier, while poor folks are systematically denied access to medical and consumer technologies, also affecting their life spans. For this prompt option, you will relate this William Gibson quote in discussing how unevenness and inequality is engaged in either Lisa Nakamura’s readings from Weeks 4 or 5 (optional reading for W5), the Jean Baudrillard reading from Week 4, or Banet-Weiser and Johnson readings (W5). You may also engage with the Legacy Russell reading from Week 2, if helpful to your analysis.
Starting questions for Nakamura:
How does uneven access to technology resonate with Lisa Nakamura’s work on race and science fiction, race and the Internet?
How do our collective stories about the future (represented in films like The Matrix from Week 4, and the clips from Avatar and/or Minority Report that we discussed in Week 5’s lecture session) reflect the unevenness Gibson brings up in this quote?
Starting questions for Baudrillard:
Please review the powerpoint slide 4 has the quote.
How does this unevenness also affect how individuals experience hyperreality, or simulation? How is this represented either in the films we watched for class, and/or in the new media artwork that Legacy Russell writes about in her book?
Though he parts from Marxism in important ways, Baudrillard is trained in Marxist approaches that focus on class struggle as a driving influence on politics, the economy, and culture. How would his argument and concepts change if he were attentive to how race, gender, and sexual identity also shape postmodern experiences of the hyperreal?
Nakamura (1041) examines images of the networked interface in mainstream science fiction movies and contends that these portrayals racialize adoption of innovations. The Net’s racio-visual logic operates via a succession of contradictions. Digital technologies, such as face recognition, successfully implement and instrumentalize ethnicity in the same way that the Human Genome Project identifies exactly which chromosomes “contain” race. Scholars such as Donna Haraway, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Maria Fernandez have eloquently chronicled and challenged the rise of scientism, particularly the prioritization of biotechnology sciences. This great cultural value placed on science as a means of comprehending identity, conduct and the self as political phenomenon proceeds to weaken humanistically based concepts of the socially created subject.
