Virtual Everything

In the article below, I have allowed myself to digress from my main subject because of the huge role the Internet is playing in our lives, careers and social activities

Nowadays we use the Web as means of acquiring information and knowledge, as a political and intellectual platform, as a forum for arguing a case or defending a cause, as an arena for activism and as a substitute for reality in a virtual world. The latter is what I want to talk about because that is what the social networks are offering us:  virtual relationships, virtual friendships even virtual romances. The net has become a part of our daily existence, that is if we use the Internet as part of our normal exchange whether be it related to business, art or writing . There are some people who believe in the potential of the cyberspace for establishing special relationships because those people are creative, imaginative and can bridge the gap between the real and the virtual. There are others who are so tied down to earth, empiricism, logic and the realities that must be tested by actual experience, not airy fairy flights of the imagination, as to suspect and denounce the whole process. Now if we start with scepticism we end with scepticism and much more.

 

Very little has been written in this field because it defies our traditional social approaches and the habitual channels for building relationships. In my opinion, such issues are of the future and we, in the present, are taking our first steps into virtual reality’s loves, hates, betrayals, deceptions and the whole range of human emotions. Virtual relationships are fragile, undefined and easy to dismiss and deny. Virtual space can give us the chance to delve into the mysteries of the mind and the soul unhindered by the physical, but at a price which varies between costly  and very costly, for here we do not have too much or too little reality;  instead we do not have any real reality because it is replaced by virtual reality which is a contradiction in terms as it should be called instead, to coin a word, virtuality. While exploring virtuality, we can be lead to some of the deepest of exchanges between minds and talents, rising above the mundane and courting the essence of things.

 

 On the other hand , virtual relationships can be underestimated, belittled, demeaned, dismissed as unreal and absurd, even abused. If deceptions exist in the real world, then their likelihood in virtual space is multiplied endlessly. Virtual space is for the strong of heart and spirit, a means of discovery and exploring realms undiscovered before, but with the weak- hearted and those who cling to the one reality they know or are in the virtual space for manipulation , it might lead to virtual disasters, emotional darkness, mental agonies  or to tragedies. I wish more thinkers,  researchers and specialists would explore the subject and write about it extensively because virtual reality is here to stay and is our future.

Alisar Iram