ephemerology - n. - the study of the unreal

When we talk about virtual worlds, usually we mean something like Second Life, or World of Warcraft – something that falls into the Neuromancer/Lawnmower Man/Matrix school of virtual reality. It’s about 3D environments that replicate or extend our world and dreams up uploading yourself into it, leaving your fleshy prison behind.

However, I was looking at a blog post by Brian Solis. In it he has some graphs of virtual worlds, placing them by ‘sector’ and by age group. There’s some interesting info in there. But what struck me is the number of things in there that I’d never heard of, and the number of things I wouldn’t really have thought of as a ‘virtual world’. These include things like Gaia Online, Neopets and Webkinz. This makes me think that what I think of as a ‘virtual world’ is a rather limited definition.

So, it occurred to me that this idea needs to be taken further. Once, William Gibson said that cyberspace was where you were when you were on the telephone. And I think this is really one of the great revelations of the information age. From the telephone forward, we have been visiting virtual worlds.

The basic facet of virtuality in all of its forms seems to be the disassocation of self from physical place. When we are on the telephone, we are communicating in real time with someone who is not sharing the same space. This is a different sort of interaction than in earlier communication-over-distance. That was just writing letters – passing messages back and forth. But the immediacy of real-time conversation has a different effect, I think. Instead of just messages, it becomes a shared experience. In essence, you were both ‘there’. There just wasn’t an actual ‘there’ involved.

At that point, ‘there’ becomes a consensual construct. Rather than a place, it’s a point of reference for the experience and gains a measure of reality, one that is completely subjective. Humans can only really think of such a thing in terms of place. So when we talk on the phone, we are ‘on’ the phone, we are ‘in’ a virtual world, etc. Any place where we can have a experience that uses a non-real point of reference instead of place can and should be considered ‘virtual’. Not just your 3D worlds, but telephone conversations, IM chats, IRC channels and more. And even non-realtime interactions that provide that sense of place – BBSes, roleplaying games, etc – reach into the realm of virtuality.

So when we talk about the virtual, we have to realize that this is actually an umbrella term with fuzzy edges. And any exploration of virtuality has to look into these areas as well.