Virtual/Real

The final dichotomy addressed in this book is between the virtual and the real, which is introduced by recounting the story of a 1935 pulp fiction story about magical glasses providing the wearer a real immersive experience. This serves as a segue to the emergence of virtual reality in the 1990s and the idea of living a second life. What this shows is how the virtual was also constructed as a different world where utopias could be realised, which remained unrealised in the “real” world. This led to the construction of a brave virtual world which was prevalent through concepts such as e-commerce, virtual communities, and e-democracy, as well as network and information society. The many bubbles that burst, the further commodification and oligopolisation of the internet, trolling, non-democratic communities, etc. have shown us that the offline harms, offline power relations and offline interests were replicated or imposed themselves online. Another way in which the dichotomy between virtual and real manifests itself in the context of media and communication is through the phenomenon of Reality TV, which amounts to the performance of the real, and what its success with audiences says about our societies. Finally, the collapse of the virtual and the real is discussed through concepts such as media life, whereby we are living in and with media 24/7, but also Baudrillard’s simulacrum, whereby we can question to which extent this dichotomy has not dissolved. This is also relevant in the context of debates around fake news and disinformation and notions of (critical) reality.