Virtual Worlds

I suppose I started speaking about this subject in one of my first entries where I talked about The Metaverse. But the interesting development about virtual worlds is that today, in our modern world, it is difficult, if not even completely impossible, to distance and build a wall between the real world and the virtual world. What is a simulated experience to you? Is sending an SMS on your phone not an alternative, simulated form of communication between two people? Or looking at the world through the lens of a camera, is that not a enhanced, different way of looking at things? Does the experience of a lens seem virtual to you, and what about those staged, simulated news events we see on the television every single day? Once you stop and think about it, it is very difficult to separate that which is simulated and that which is real, and one starts wondering where the one ends and the other begins, and whether the criteria that set the two apart are actually still valid.

Jean Baudrillard has an allegory where he speaks of a time where a map just covered a small part of the world and was obviously fake, it hardly had any resemblance to the real thing. It was just seen as bits and pieces of simulation, scattered over the plains of reality. Now, he says, we live in a world where the map covers the entire universe and has become so realistic that it has actually become a substitute for reality. And that it is now reality that is instead scattered over the plains of simulation, barely recognizable for what it is, paraphernalia of a time and a view of the world that no longer exists and has no reference to the present. The desert of the real. I remember reading his ideas for the first time, and just how far it all went over my head. But on a second take, things actually started making sense, as much as they possibly can. And when I look at our world and the way we live it, it becomes clear to me that the virtual actually is the real and this is the way we have been living for so long, we are so immersed in our experiences and illusions, that we have lost all points of reference to a time where simulation did not exist. It's like a ghost, a curtain pulled over our eyes, and it's all that we can see.

Real? The word has lots its meaning. But we do not live in illusions, no, it has become so much more than that. When illusion is accepted as reality, it is no longer a dream, no longer a simulation. It is simulacra, it is hyperreality, it is a new and different form of life and existence. It is a merging and transformation, evaluation and destruction of all the terms we hold dear and think we know so well. It's in everything we do, however we do it. It is new, it is old, it is here, it has always been here. It is change, it is permament. In a hyperreal world, the past and the future do not exist. It is simply an everchanging and immersive present.

- Eve.