Real Virtuality

Real Virtuality is…

Real Virtuality is a “play” with the term “virtual reality” that finds one of its beginnings with Castells (1996). Castells “reverses the usual expression ‘virtual reality’ into ‘real virtuality,’ since the virtual environment cannot be considered a sort of deprivation from life, but one of its enhancements and extensions.” This “enhancement of life” is in line with TRIVreality’s business concept related to augmented reality but specifically with TRIVrealiity’s concept of “augmented relationships.”

source:
Primary source: Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Blackwell Publishers.
Secondary source: Pace, Stefano.(2009). Methods and Issues for Research in Virtual Communities. Pagani , Margherita (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Multimedia Technology and Networking;Second Edition. London and Hershey (USA): IGI Global; Information Science Reference. p.912

Real Virtuality: is sometimes ambiguously—and understandably techno-centrically—defined as a true high-fidelity multi-sensory virtual environment ” This so-called “real virtuality” seems more like high quality immersive virtual reality that “evokes the same perceptual response from a viewer as if he/she was actually present, or “there”, in the real scene being depicted (CHALMERS et al. 2009). Also known as there-reality (CHALMERS et al. 2007),” According to the authors this is “a step change from Virtual Reality. By stimulating all five senses concurrently in a natural manner, …. [it] exploits human perception including crossmodalities to selectively deliver the right mix of all the senses in real time.” It should be noted that Virtual Reality does not inherently exclude any senses (five or more). On the contrary, ideally Virtuality Reality would include all of the senses. Neither does Virtual Reality imply lower degree of quality. Therefore ideally it would be of the highest fidelity technologically possible within that time-space.

source:
Primary source: Chalmers, A. et al. (2007): “There-Reality: Selective Rendering in High Fidelity Virtual Environments” The International Journal of Virtual Reality 6, 1, 1–10.
Secondary source: Alan Chalmers and Eva Zányi. (The Digital Laboratory, WMG, University of Warwick, UK). (2010). Multi-Sensory Virtual Environments for Investigating the Past. VAR. Virtual Archaeology Review,Abril de 2010 Volumen 1 / Número 1. Note: This citation Includes tertiary editorial notes from the TRIVreality staff.

Real Virtuality: “if communities on Internet are called virtual communities, we can say that offline communities are turning more and more into “real virtualities” and that many people currently use the Internet to make this virtuality more real… the term “real virtuality” [is borrowed] from Castells (1999). He intended the term to show how the Internet has entered the tissue of society to the extent that there is no virtual reality to talk about; the virtual has become real in its consequences. He writes that “it is not virtual reality, because when our symbolic environment is, by and large, structured in this inclusive, flexible, diversified hypertext in which we navigate every day, the virtuality of this text is in fact our reality, the symbols from which we live and communicate” (p.403).”

source:
Primary source: Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Blackwell Publishers. p. 403
Secondary source: Yus, Francisco. (2005). The linguistic-cognitive essence of virtual community. IBÉRICA 9 [2005]: 79-102. Universidad de Alicante, Spain. p. 87

Real Virtuality: in it an uncertainty that a “rigid division between the ‘real’ and the virtual is [in any way] helpful” is a supporting hypothesis. Castells (2000) argues that “in Computer-Mediated Communities, the material becomes immersed in a virtual setting. This process of ‘Real Virtuality’ rejects some of the ‘classic’ ideas of how community might be conceived of within a virtual setting. As one of the early theorizers of virtual community, Rheingold (1993) had pointed out that whilst virtual communities can be referred against material relationships, the real and the virtual are quite distinct realities and that each community – the material (the real) and the virtual – do not exist in the other realm. Net communities were not material, and conversely when material communities sought virtual identities it somehow changed their character… As Castells (1996, 2001) observes, technology not only communicates experience but rather the process is itself experience – a level of reality in its own right and not a process removed from it (Castells 1996: 373). Thus as social movements, institutions, and organizations decline, in modern society, identity itself is becoming the fundamental source of social meaning. Individuals increasingly organize their identity not around what they do but on the basis of what they are, or believe they are. This process is enhanced by computer-mediated communication. Since its users are disembodied, they can be adopted into a community network when they begin to identify with a community to which they are not geographically bound. Castells terms this process ‘Personalized Community’ (2001: 127).”

source:
Primary sources: Castells, M (1996) The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc. p. 373 Castells, M. (2000) “Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society‟, British Journal of Sociology, 51(1): 5–24. Castells, M. (2001) The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 127 Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.
Secondary source: Crowe, Nic. (2009). Hanging with the ‘Cathaby Shark Gurlz’ and other Runescape stories: Young People, Identity and Community in a Virtual World. Retrieved from: Brunel University School of Sport and Education PhD Theses at http://dspace.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/4455 on September 8, 2010.

Real Virtuality: “Castells’ easy pun on virtual reality, opens up a space to discuss the culture of the network society. As might be expected, this is a culture heavily shaped by the media; only the old-fashioned mass media, feeding its mass audience a standardized product, has all-but gone, replaced by the proliferating multimedia or micro-media of ‘narrowcasting’, the many-to-many communications of the Internet, and the flattening of distinctions between producers and consumers of media content… The culture of real virtuality is woven from the heterogeneous experiences of the new multimedia environment, the ‘global hypertext’ (Castells 2001a: 170).”

source:
Castells, M. (2001). ‘Epilogue: informationalism and the network society’, in P. Himanen, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. London: Secker & Warburg. p170
Secondary source: Bell, David. (2007). Cyberculture theorists : Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway; Routledge Critical Thinkers essential guides for literary studies. London and New York: Routledge. p77.

Real Virtuality: “If informationalism is the economic manifestation of the information age, and the network society its social morphology, then real virtuality is its culture. Culture is all about communication, so radical transformations in communications technologies augur cultural change. Castells uses the term multimedia as a shorthand for the proliferating devices and forms of content available to segmented markets of ‘prosumers’. Instead of mass media and mass audiences, the new media products emphasize interactivity and personalization, and the process of decoding cultural texts produces each person’s own hypertext, through which they make sense of the world and their place within it. As it always is, culture is virtual (i.e. mediated by symbols) and real (i.e. it is our reality, our experience). As Castells says, his main purpose in discussing real virtuality ‘is to reintegrate virtuality as core to our reality and to our experience. … So we cannot oppose what is real and what is virtual because the virtual is a fundamental part of the real’ (Castells with Catterall 2001: 20, 19).”

source:
Bell, David. (2007). Cyberculture theorists : Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway; Routledge Critical Thinkers essential guides for literary studies. London and New York: Routledge. pp.86-87

Real Virtuality: “Castells argues that the information revolution of the last couple of decades can be distinguished by the emergence of a new culture—a culture of real virtuality. Here, peoples’ daily lives, their experiences are increasingly ‘… captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make believe, in which appearances are not just on the screen through which experience is communicated, but they become the experience’ (1996, page 373). Castells states; ‘… the culture of real virtuality [is] where make-believe is belief in the making’ (1996, page 375). In other words, it is where the ‘real’ —’people’s material/symbolic existence’ (page 373)—is reconfigured and produced through intersections with the ‘virtual’.'”

source:
Primary source: Castells M. (1996). Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 373, 375.
Secondary source: Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin. (2004). Flying through code/space: the real virtuality of air travel. Environment and Planning A 2004, volume 36, pages 195-211.

Real Virtuality: “For Castells, real virtuality also alters the formal qualities of time as processed and experienced, producing a condition of timeless time. Within communication and media technologies, he contends that temporality is erased, suspended, and transformed. It is a “… timeless landscape of computer networks and electronic media, where all expressions are either instantaneous or without predicable sequencing” (Castells, 1998, page 350). History exists only as codes in the networked system, a system that is simultaneously present across time zones around the globe. Moreover, the temporal codes within systems can be split and spliced, so data generated at, or referring to, different times can be recombined in nonsequential forms, inducing a condition of timelessness. Every time a global communication network is accessed and used, time- less time—timelessness and simultaneous presence—is invoked. Real virtuality is ‘at the same time of the eternal and of the ephemeral. It is eternal because it reaches back and forth to the whole sequence of cultural expressions. It is ephemeral because each arrangement, each specific sequencing, depends on the context and purpose under which any given cultural construction is solicited’ (Castells, 1996, page 462).”

source:
Primary source: Castells M. (1998). End of the Millennium. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 350, 462.
Secondary source: Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin. (2004). Flying through code/space: the real virtuality of air travel. Environment and Planning A 2004, volume 36, pages 195-211.