Virtual Convergence of Alternative Human Realities

Human reality is not unified, fortunately for humanity. We may speak of alternative human realities that occur upon multiple levels of social stratification. Upon a psychological level, we can find as many different human realities as we find individual people in the world. There is a sense of anthropological relativity of human reality that, in a symbolic sense, we live in a world that is ultimately solipsistic, of our own internal construction. Fortunately, the world hangs together, and hangs together well, because we share similar biology, similar environments, and similar cultural contexts, and the fact of this sharing is what the human world is really built up. 

It is no small wonder therefore that the world hangs together as well as it does, or that it is frequently prone to destructive events, or that people often drift off the edge of normal reality in their own little worlds that we refer to as mental illness, and that sometimes even groups of people may run amok and do crazy things.

The internet has permitted as nothing before the availability of human beings to express themselves in a common forum that has global reach, and it is not surprising therefore that we get so much of the "full Monty" on the web from so many different directions. The worldwide web is surprisingly rich in its diversity and range of content and thematic matter that is addressed, and this includes especially themes and topics that were, in a print-media world, were largely off the public radar.

As a consequence, there has been the emergence of what I would call new forms of "e-culture" that is a consequence of people sharing information, ideas, and values via the Internet across very broad distances, and the formation of new e-communities and groups around a wide range of subjects and common interests. This occurrence was simply not possible in a pre-Internet world, but to some extent had been anticipated with telephone based clubs and organizations like dating services, etc., that operated generally through local newspapers and especially underground tabloids or newsletters.

Thus, we should expect the development of what might be referred to as "sub-cultural" patterns and communities that are primarily web-based and that are distributed widely. Many of these "sub-cultures" will be in a conventional or classical sense "marginal" in terms of behavior, life-style, values and symbolic realities that they embody, and even often "counter-cultural" or "vice-cultural" in terms of their expression and relations with the larger world. The recent case of the German cannibal who ate a voluntary victim whom he had met over the Internet is an example of a form and quality of interaction that is the consequence of the Internet--people can find and get almost anything they are looking for, if it is out there to be had. The case of chronic child pornography and even underground communities devoted to paedophilia represents to me a phenomena that is more than just 'coming out of the closet' but a form of e-culture actually engendered and made more available and hence possibly more common as a consequence of the Internet. It is not just that there are unscrupulous opportunities seeking to exploit anything in the world for profit, but that new cultural frameworks and "systems" emerge as a consequence that feed on people, and that people, in turn, feed upon in a manner that we can refer to as socio-genesis and "cultural schismogenesis."

Even more importantly, I think, we should expect a pattern of complex stratification and organization of e-cultural and e-social groupings in the world, distributed widely and overlapping one another in probably unpredictable ways. As a consequence of this we should expect human processes of identification and psychological and behavioral internalization to reflect this emergent complexity and to become largely "virtual" in terms of its manifestation and effects.

One aspect of this which I think is important and not completely recognized in its effects or its pattern, is the direct cybernetic relationship that occurs between an individual and the computer and the virtual world available through the computer. In a sense it is the epitome of a vicarious life-style. But even in a more organic and embodied sense the computer becomes a direct extension of the human nervous system in terms of articulation and expression regulating behavioral response and modifying behavior overall. It is remarkable to me that subjective sensibilities can be modified as a consequence of being on-line--sense of time gets distorted and often lost, almost in a way similar to state-dependent behavior such as with alcohol. In playing intense video-games, there is also a sense of over-stimulation of parts of the brain that may not be normally stimulated. Furthermore, it is evident that the web can be the basis for a psychological de-repression and for the circumvention of what can be thought of as normal mechanisms and avenues of impulse control. I think this is particularly evident with content that is sexually or violent explicit and extremely graphic.