´Virtuality is a little-understood fiction of presence that operates on a different plane (…), has a different relation to action and to cause and effect than the fiction we know from the novel and film. The conventions of fiction as representation (…) are more sophisticated (…) than the fictions of presence, that vary in mood from persuasive performance to subjunctive presentation to outright lies and deception; such utterances or performances include images meant to shape or invent a world, not represent it. Once the simultaneity of liveness becomes instant feedback between images and the world, an inversion takes place in what was once called representation: neither image nor the world is `first`, and each is likely to shape the other. Virtuality is a dematerialized and for that reason, ontologically uncertain mode of presence. (…) the virtual does not yet necessarily (a) represent `reality´ in ways we have come to expect, nor (b) distinguish between imaginary and real consequences of manipulating symbols; nor (c) is it always framed off from everyday life, like, for instance, theatrical or novelistic fiction. Consequently, (d) the reality statuses of virtuality have not yet been culturally mastered or regulated (…).' (Morse, 1998: 20 ff)

References

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