The Virtual
1) In my opinion, one of the most interesting aspects in the study of space is how different social practices affect (and are affected) within the interaction of space. One of question that comes to my mind is, in the context of location-based technologies, how does spatial experience change in the process of “actualizing information as space and space as information”? (de Souza & Sutko, 2011, p. 37). For example, the authors explain that LBSs, such as WikiMe, influence how a user thinks about space and how users experience location augmented by LBSs. Therefore, we would be facing the idea that social practices such as tourism and entertainment suffer a modification because of the interference of location-based technologies. In other words, could we think that nowadays the ideas we have in relation to the physical world (represented in cities, monuments, museums, etc.) would be conditioned by the interaction between the virtual and the physical? Would the “market” of entertainment and tourism should change the way they offer places to visit?
2) Just a thought…. Imagination! Perhaps, that is one of the core components of the virtual. I cannot stop thinking about imagination while reading Rajchman’s reflection on the virtual house. Deleuze (as explained by de Souza & Sutko) considers that “the real encompasses both our actual world and the potential to produce new realities” (p. 33). If we use the metaphor of the body (and the brain) to explain the way technological devices work, then the mind and imagination becomes the counterpart of the virtual. Rajchman states that the virtual “thinks in terms of arrangements of body and soul, irreducible to any such symbolic order, any such law of possibilities” (p. 120) and for that reason we could consider the virtual can only be compared to processes of the mind that have certain potential to be part of the real. Therefore, the virtual might not have limits, but it is interesting to consider that the devices that allow the virtual to become actual might impose some boundaries.
3) Tierney explains that “a more accurate description of the virtual, then, is as the nexus of an entire set of cognitive, social, and material activities” (p. 137). I think that this is does not only point out at the notion of the virtual but also at the notion of culture and social experience. Therefore, does culture enter into the field of the virtual? Could we say that culture helps to determine the way in which the virtual emerges or the virtual shapes and modifies culture?
Definition:
The virtual space: it is the field where multiplicities of possible worlds can be actualized simultaneously.