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Becoming Virtual, by Pierre Levy
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Virtual reality is a phenomenon that captivates people of all ages and all levels of technical expertise. It appears on the Internet and in computer games, and is used, among other places, in high-tech software for doctors, engineers, and scientists. But, is it really something new? And how does it affect us?
Examining the social and cultural impact of new digital technologies, Levy tackles the concept of "the virtual," demonstrating how it has always been an enduring component of the human mind. He shows how the body, the text, and the economy, are made virtual. He then reveals how the Internet and web sites are now transforming the virtual into a "collective intelligence" linked to digital communication.Succinct, accessible, and profound, Becoming Virtual is an intellectual tour de force from one of France's most brilliant young thinkers.
- Sales Rank: #990676 in Books
- Published on: 1998-03-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .87" h x 6.29" w x 9.28" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 250 pages
Amazon.com Review
Pierre Levy takes a fresh look at the whole idea of what is virtual. He's responding to the widespread belief, and sometimes even panic, that a digital society with emphasis on virtual interactions is necessarily depersonalizing. He takes particular exception to the notion that "virtual" and "real" are opposites. Instead, Levy argues that virtuality is one of four modes of existence, the rest of which he describes as reality, possibility, and actuality. Each is defined in terms of its relationship with its environment.
In following Levy's world view, you may find that he interprets some or all of those terms in ways you're not used to, but the result is an interesting new approach to what it means to be part of an increasingly digital world. He examines the virtualization of several elements our society: the corporal body, text, the economy, language, technology, contracts, intelligence, subjects, and objects. What he finds is not a destruction of the personal so much as a transformation. Virtualization adds to, but does not replace, the real, the possible, and the actual. By understanding what virtualization means and involves, Levy believes that society will gain a greater variety of options for interaction in all areas. Becoming Virtual is a serious philosophical work, dense with ideas. It demands a lot from the reader, but rewards with an intriguing new perspective on inevitable social change. --Elizabeth Lewis
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Virtually incomprehensible
By A Customer
This book is extremely heavy on the esoteric, philosophical lingo. As a virtual environment systems designer, I found it to be essentially useless. My guess is that it would be of value only to academicians and others not directly involved in the technological aspects of VE and other digital domains. Although I suspect there might have been some useful stuff here, the writing is too tangled to unravel. If you speak academese, you might fare better than I did.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A Must-Read
By Nick Drengenberg
The word 'virtual' has had a fair amount of exercise in the last few decades, and it would be a pity if some were put off reading this wonderful book due to the misguided belief it may be populated with computer lingo and people with wetware engaged in simulated 'virtual' sex. Levy's understanding of the virtual extends far beyond information technology; he gives the concept a proper philosophical and even anthropological foundation, and even goes so far as to show that we have in fact always been virtual, and this is what has made us human.
Technology is probably what separates us from all other living creatures, or at least sophisticated technology, such as machines. Yes, other organisms utilise simple tools and what have you, but none of them are going to the moon in any sort of hurry. Levy's work is essentially about artifacts, be they software like language or symbols, or hardware like tools and machines. However, following on from the work of philosophers such as Deleuze and Serres, Levy is profoundly against the two common (mis)conceptions about them: that they 'dominate' us, or that they are simple tools in our hands, doing our bidding. Heidegger and his ilk were very keen on the domination idea, but that's only because they didn't really understand machines; sure, your VCR will seem to dominate you, if you can't work it, as many older people will tell you, but after a good dose of swearing and fumbling the usual result is a machine that just sits there doing nothing. Hardly despotism. Or you may have its measure, and say it's just a tool for capturing video images, for whatever purpose, and yet it changes the way you watch TV, capture memories of your kids, and the entire institutional set-up of the film industry. Quite a clever tool, that.
If you read this book (and you should), Levy will tell you that all artifacts, including less 'material' ones like language, virtualise our lives. That doesn't mean making them less real, the common usage of 'virtual'; it means problematising them, opening them up to possibilities. Making them MORE real. And this isn't naive techno-optimism, because not only are not all these possibilities not nice, but when you virtualise something you take on-board the requirements of the virtualising medium, which have to be met to keep it running, and you become entwined with the other people associated with these artifacts, such as video repair men. Technology can truly make you feel like a god, but it always needs to be fixed, and you have to undertake profound social relationships for it to happen at all (nobody builds an aircraft carrier alone in their backyard). Or take our oldest and most 'simple' artifact: language. Language, says Levy, virtualises 'real-time', by which he means our everyday interactions with other people. That's what it means to 'discuss' something, you take an immediate issue confronting two or more people, and you use language to open it up to different resolution paths which aren't immediately obvious. And again, this isn't artifact as god or slave: the language doesn't dominate you, although it has in-built constraints which you must adhere to if you want to be understood, and you can't just tell people what to do and see it happen, because not only are allowed meanings consensual or social, but also there is no direct causal link between utterance and action.
Levy explores the way we virtualise every aspect of our lives, from real-time interaction through language, to our actions through technology, and our social relations through institutions. And in each case the mechanism is the same: we create some artifact, more or less material, which allows us to shift what's at stake away from the immediate here-and-now and towards a problematic where new possibilities open up. And again Levy avoids simplistic determinism of any persuasion by emphasising that each of these artifacts simultaneously creates new social arrangements, and introduces new imperatives through the need for their upkeep. This is how the philosophy becomes anthropology, and why Levy says to be human IS to be virtual; it is our species that has taken these artifacts into our collectives, that has used the world to mediate our social lives. And the world extracts a price too, because artifacts impose requirements back upon us, if we want them to keep working, that is. The end of domination, either of artifact by human, or human by artifact.
This is Levy's most accessible book, in English, relatively free of the sometimes over-blown prose of Collective Intelligence. Like Bruno Latour, also an admirer of Serres and Deleuze, Levy allows us to see exactly how our technological, modern world is every bit as religious, barbaric, enlightened, enchanted, mystical or whatever as it has always been; you just have to understand artifacts. (It is also a tremendous asset for philosophy students who don't fully understand the scope of the Begsonian/Deleuzean 'virtual'.)
And as another reviewer has hinted, there's even theology in nuts and bolts, if you know where to look.
28 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
Lévy gives us a new way of seeing culture.
By Kathy Kang (kangk@www.nsw.gov.au)
This is one of those rare books that will re-wire many minds. Lévy gives us a new way of seeing culture. He achieves this by linking specific cultural activities, and thereby humankind, to a fundamental process that is outside place and time - the process of virtualisation.
That the book produces its profound cognitive effect in so few words is stunning. Part of the credit for this feat must go to the translator, Bononno.
'Becoming Virtual' in my view surpasses that other classic,'Understanding Computers and Cognition' by Winograd and Flores. Lévy depicts cognition and action as both social process, and process occurring within the individual. He introduces concepts sparingly and tellingly, illustrating them with examples reaching from the dawn of the human era to the present day.
A book that can be read at one sitting, but will demand to be picked up again many, many times in the years ahead.
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