The Social Trajectory of Virtual Reality: Substantive Ethics in a World Without Constraints
by Michael Cranford

This article was printed in Technology in Society 18 (1996): 79-92.

While the emerging scientific and educational applications of virtual reality (VR) receive a great deal of attention, these should not be confused with the psycho-social impact of the medium itself. This article explores the trajectory of the medium's social influence independent of discrete applications. VR technologies are directed at enjoining a participatory engagement in a virtual world which leaves the user unconscious of the interface. Virtual worlds are constructed to promote increased participation; the worlds are created with a sense of incompleteness, which draws the user into the world experientially, seeking to explore and be fulfilled. The experience of VR not only requires the removal of physical constraints, but also any sense of risk and consequence—constraints which undermine a participatory engagement and mitigate both the interface's transparency and the user's satisfaction. Moral responsibility constitutes a constraint which not only mitigates a virtual worlds experience, but which may prove antithetical to the medium's long-range social influence.

Virtual reality technologies have engendered a great deal of excitement and controversy, originating from the circles of those responsible for the technologies but extended through mass media coverage to infect popular culture. The source of the controversy is unmistakable—the trajectory of virtual reality (VR) has been expressed by its founders in vague, ecstatic terms without sensitivity to its broader ethical and social implications. Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research and one of VR's chief visionaries, states, "It's very hard to describe [VR] if you haven't experienced it. But there is an experience when you are dreaming of all possibilities being there, that anything can happen, and it is just an open world where your mind is the only limitation."¹ Some of the "possibilities" dreamt of include teledildonics (the creation of virtual sexual experiences through computer controlled or remote-user controlled tactile simulators) and the use of virtual reality to induce altered mental states, with effects comparable to those of hallu- cinogens like LSD or psilocybin. While more level-headed celebrants of this technology are quick to downplay its hallucinogenic and erotogenic uses,² one cannot help wonder at the influence of some of the technology's leading spokespeople, including Timothy Leary.³

Since the real promise of virtual reality is yet future, its ultimate technological form is a matter of speculation. No one is quite certain as to how vivid the phenomenological perception of virtual worlds will get. Nevertheless, the technology admits of a certain economic trajectory and a basic psychological appeal that may permit us to project its destination in broad social terms and posit some of the ethical implications that will emerge in connection with the advancement of the technology itself. It is essential that we make the attempt, since, as with many emergent technologies, the growing momentum of VR's development will likely brush social concerns by the wayside. Howard Rheingold notes,

Given the rate of development of VR technologies, we don't have a great deal of time to tackle questions of morality, privacy, personal identity, and even the prospect of a fundamental change in human nature. When the VR revolution really gets rolling, we are likely to be too busy turning into whatever we are turning into to analyze or debate the consequences.⁴

With our personal investment in the technology and the practical or emotional benefits we derive from it comes a corresponding loss in our ability to "see around" the technology and address it critically. The growth and influence of television on American culture provides an excellent example and warning. Social criticism abounds, but the medium has become a juggernaut, an unstoppable component of Americana. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out over 30 years ago, media "are put out long before they are thought out. In fact, their being put outside us tends to cancel the possibility of their being thought out at all."⁵ Virtual reality has already been "put out," but this present work will make an effort to think through its social and ethical implications while the technology itself remains in its infant phase, with the hope that constructive dialogue and social responsibility will emerge from all concerned.

The Message of VR

Primary in my analysis will be a separation of the content or application of virtual reality technologies from the underlying essence or message of the medium itself. Applying McLuhan's aphorism "The medium is the message" to our present concern, our discussion can be framed as an answer to the resulting question, "What is the message of VR?" Most current discussion of virtual reality centers on issues of content—the multifarious application of virtual world paradigms, such as computer-assisted design and architectural walk-through, W Industries' game Virtuality, surgical modeling, educational and scientific simulations, and telerobotics.⁶ The uses of this technology are so protean that one might mistake the tangible benefits derived in each instance with the ultimate social ramifications of the medium more broadly conceived. As McLuhan noted, "the ‘message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. . . The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association."⁷ While I would argue that the content or uses of a medium or technology can be more socially effectual than McLuhan seems to allow, we can agree that the essential message of VR is particularly worthy of consideration for precisely the reason that it is unconsciously accepted all the while we are mulling over questions about the technology's use. The "message" of VR is more socially significant than its various uses because the psycho-social impact of VR remains virtually unappraised. This is particularly the case when we recognize that the point of contact between this technology and the vast majority of us will never be efficient tractors. Similarly, a focus on the educational content of television obscures the social fragmentation and decline of literacy which all but the most dedicated technophiles attribute to the essence of that medium.

The message of VR is rooted in its ability to engage the user in his or her perception of a virtual world. VR technology not only provides the construction of a virtual world, but engenders the sense that we are there. In a sense, VR is the final stop on a much broader trajectory in our desire to create, manipulate, and be entertained by symbolic representations. As Brenda Laurel suggests, "The notion of virtual reality is a continuum that is older even than science fiction."⁸ Even as film was able to engage viewers in a sensory representation more poignant than that of a novel, VR promises a depth of sensory participation and empathy that surpasses anything heretofore represented cinematographically. As computer technology has progressed, earlier stages of electronic textuality have been abandoned in favor of applications and interfaces that draw the user more transparently into the reality the computer constructs. While computers were once touted primarily as storage facilities for vast quantities of data (as might be seen in an electronic edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica), Kramarae notes that "increasingly, the focus in the professional, popular, and scholarly publications is on virtual reality . . . what is coming is entertainment and interaction. The computer was an extension of the book . . . VR, however, is discussed as an extension of the movies."⁹ Professional journals of computer graphics discuss the development of virtual reality technologies with precisely this aim in mind: "The key idea is that the virtual environment is trying to create a different world that one interacts with as if it were real. . . In this way, the computer system must sense the user as unobtrusively and naturally as possible."¹⁰ If we allow Brenda Laurel's correspondence between the computer's representation of an illusory world and a theatrical performance, then the virtual performance is only "working" when the audience members are not aware of the technical aspects of the production at all.¹¹ The technology moves in this direction precisely because computer users want to be entertained in this manner.

Richard Lanham, in his discussion of how our conception of text changes once it is brought into electronic format, argues that the computer is not fundamentally a device for creating transparent realities which leave the user unconscious of its explicit workings, but is instead a rhetorical device, facilitating our ability to oscillate between looking "at" the image or text constructed on the screen and looking "through" it to the illusory reality it constructs.¹² According to Lanham, the computer's ability to interact, perform visual scaling, and permit editing of texts and images (which are essentially unfixed and therefore changeable in electronic format), has recaptured the spirit of classical rhetoric which is not only intrinsic to the computer's nature, but which mirrors and even fulfills Western social thought.¹³ More specifically, the computer's ability to oscillate between looking at and through constructed realities reflects a growing postmodern reevaluation of our cultural decorum. "What is extraordinary is not how digital technology has compelled us toward a fundamental cultural reevaluation, but rather how that technology can—if we use it right—express so eloquently an omnipresent reevaluation already in being."¹⁴

Lanham's point makes good sense of electronic text, but entirely misses the mark with regard to the essential nature of the computer or the uses to which it is increasingly being applied. To the degree that the computer is used to manipulate text, the user cannot but help be aware not only of the reality the words construct, but also the presence of the words on the computer screen. But except for certain discrete applications (like word processing), the role of electronic textuality is diminishing. Hypertext, as the most recent development in electronic textuality, is at best a transitional genre. The oscillation which Lanham perceives to be fundamental to computers as rhetorical devices is primarily a function of limitations in technology. As technology progresses, the user will notice the system less and less. The tendency to look "at" the computer rather than "through" it will diminish. To the degree that the user oscillates back and forth, the sense of participating in a virtual world is undermined. What Lanham touts as the essence of the computer's functionality is what hardware and software developers are feverishly trying to overcome. Developments in this regard are particularly evident in interface design. Laurel notes that

Before VR the vast majority of work done in the interface domain took for granted the notion of the computer as an explicit party to the interaction, and satisfied itself with making that interaction smooth, tractable, "natural"—nay, intuitive. It astounds me that this notion has such tenacity. If the same phenomena happened in the domain of film, we would all go to see projectors instead of movies. By positing that one may treat a computer-generated world as if it were real, VR contradicts the notion that one needs a special-purpose language to interact with computers. In fact, it throws out the idea of the interface as a cognitive artifact, tool, or anything else that should impinge on our experience.¹⁵

In other words, VR contradicts the idea of oscillation (a self-conscious manipulation of the computer as a tool) in favor of an ever-increasing transparency (an unconscious participation in a virtual world created by the computer).

It is at this point that I would like to offer a definition of VR, in line with my foregoing observations. Virtual reality is a human-computer interface that immerses the user in an illusory world created by the system to enjoin the greatest degree of participation possible within that world.¹⁶ While the technology is still rough, and our closest experience to VR may be sitting with our faces pressed to a computer screen, gripping a flight stick and engrossed in a jetfighter simulation late in the evening, we yearn to be more complete participants in the world created for us. To the degree that the goal of VR is realized, and we find ourselves to be immersed participants in a virtual world, our consciousness of the real world diminishes. The greater our degree of participation, the more engrossed we become in the virtual world, and the less conscious of the real one. In contrast, the more we oscillate and are conscious of our distinction or separation from the system, the more detached we feel from the illusory world presented to us. As we detach and no longer participate, the sense of the world's reality recedes.

The Erotic Allure of VR

The salient feature of VR is not simply that it aims at constructing illusory worlds to engender greater participation, but that we yearn to become more fully immersed in the worlds which are created. There is a psychological or emotional allure of VR which accounts for our broad cultural interest in this technology and the impetus toward its ongoing development. Michael Heim defines the allure of virtual reality as essentially erotic. We yearn for a more transparent experience with the system to achieve fulfillment and personal satisfaction.

Our love affair with computers, computer graphics, and computer networks runs deeper than aesthetic fascination and deeper than the play of the senses. We are searching for a home for the mind and heart. Our fascination with computers is more erotic than sensuous, more spiritual than utilitarian. Eros, as the ancient Greeks understood, springs from a feeling of insufficiency or inadequacy. Whereas the aesthete feels drawn to casual play and dalliance, the erotic lover reaches out to a fulfillment far beyond aesthetic detachment.¹⁷

Heim notes that this fulfillment is realized by an attachment between the human and the system that is almost symbiotic. This symbiosis expresses not some mere sensual urge, but a desire for intensity of experience and psychological fulfillment through the interface. This may seem strikingly odd at first blush, since the erotic urge is not normally associated with a non-physical engagement. And yet, this terminology captures the allure of interactive participation in a virtual world, which eclipses the passive emotional engagement we have come to identify with television. Allucquère Stone notes that the computer-human interaction simultaneously constitutes this paradox of erotic pleasure and a sense of loss of control over the body. The corresponding longing to participate in virtual space (or cyberspace) "is frequently accompanied by a desire, inarticulately expressed, to penetrate the interface and merge with the system—what I have humorously referred to elsewhere as ‘cyborg envy.'"¹⁸ The erotic allure of VR is not merely the desire to become an immersed participant in a virtual world, but to cross over into the world itself. This desire, perhaps insatiable in light of overwhelming technological and metaphysical limitations, continues to make its appeal through the medium of VR.

We might also appeal to McLuhan's description of "hot" and "cool" media as another way of expressing the allure of VR. A "hot" medium is one which floods the observer with information, leaving him or her with little to contribute to the experience and thereby negating participation and empathy (McLuhan's term for emotional engagement). A "cool" medium gives the observer less and therefore demands more. "Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience."¹⁹ Radio is a hot medium, television cool. Virtual reality is the coolest yet, since it provides not only fragmentary information about the world it depicts, but it tantalizes the participant with the promise of a world to be entered, a space to be explored, and mysteries to be discovered. It demands not only that the participant supply what is missing, but that she supply it with herself.

The erotic lure of VR as a world to be explored has been recognized as interactive software's most crucial selling point in a consumer market. Adapting successful metaphors from cinema to promote interactive multimedia requires that we "consider psychological aspects and understand the cognitive process of how people perceive visual information and react to it, which programs generate in the viewer the greatest lust for excitement and hence give the greatest pleasure."²⁰ These authors point out that the key to realizing this lust for excitement in interactive software is by invoking dissimilarities and omissions in metaphor relative to a new object of knowledge, which in present terms refers to the virtual world generated by a given piece of software. As the user participates in the application, he or she is intentionally left with a sense of incompleteness. "This sense of incompleteness and open-endedness initiates thought processes, stimulates interactivity and action. . . a good video metaphor . . . is one that also meets our criteria of inciting lust in the viewer to explore further the information."²¹ One can appreciate VR's allure when one realizes that it embodies this principle of a good video metaphor inherently. The creation of a virtual world necessarily invites participation by virtue of its incompleteness. The world which is created begs to be explored. This incompleteness draws the participant into the virtual world experientially, providing a sense of emotional engagement and psychological fulfillment unparalleled in other media experiences. VR's allure is, understood in these terms, fundamentally erotic.

Closely connected with VR's erotic allure is its capacity to foster consumer satisfaction or, as the earlier quote expressed, to generate in the participant the greatest lust for excitement and hence the greatest pleasure. As Aukstakalnis notes, the most successful applications in VR will be within the entertainment field.²² The billions of dollars spent on video games and high-tech entertainment guarantee that private funding will continue to follow a technology that appeals to consumer lust as one of its inherent components. As the U.S.'s marketing power deteriorates generally, its success in marketing media-driven pop culture guarantees a surge of speculation along the lines of popular VR applications.²³ Commercialism has long capitalized on the use of intense, emotionally engaging and participatory visual effects to engender consumer interest and provide a stimulus toward consumption. "These technical capacities for use in visual, optical, photographic, and audio forms offered improved ways to intensify excitement, organize audience attention, and capture and hold interest. What better way to describe the objectives of advertisers on behalf of their sponsors . . . ?"²⁴ I might tentatively offer virtual reality as an even better way to achieve the same response. The intense emotional, participatory engagement fostered by VR, with an accompanying guarantee of pleasure and fulfillment for those who experience it, makes this an even better medium for commercialism. Even VR applications in fields outside of entertainment are, for the person transported into the simulation or virtual experience, a source of pleasure. Whether that sense of pleasure is a means to an end or an end in itself, VR applications are inherently entertaining, and trends show that corporate marketers are aware of this.

It is not at all surprising, in light of the erotic allure of this medium and an attendant satisfaction as one participates within it, that erotogenic possibilities should surface in most popular discussions of VR. Mike Saenz, creator of the interactive pornographic application Virtual Valerie, states, "I think lust motivates technology. The first personal robots, let's face it, are not going to be bought to bring people drinks."²⁵ While technology is still decades away from achieving Saenz's dream, the economic trajectory of this technology and its inherent allure (which includes sensory immersion, lustful exploration, emotional engagement, and participatory pleasure) assure an ultimate realization along these lines. To argue that VR will never be used primarily as an entertainment product, or that as an entertainment product its users will not seek erotic fulfillment is, borrowing a phrase from McLuhan, a modern somnambulance. "When people seem to want a technology to develop, to literally lust for a possible new toy, that need can take on a force of its own."²⁶ All value judgments set aside, the allure of VR and its consumer potential guarantee that it will be used (if not used primarily) as erotogenic entertainment.

VR and a World Without Limits

The allure of VR is dependent on transparency in two senses. The first is that already discussed, the sense of participation in a virtual world without conscious regard for one's own body or the technical underpinnings of the interface. The second is the abandonment of external constraints. Virtual worlds admit of the possibility of fulfillment and pleasure precisely because the inherent limitations of the physical world are left behind. As constraints and limitations are relieved in the experience of a virtual world, greater transparency is effected and participation is increasingly enabled. The basic limitations of the flesh, left behind on the human side of the interface, are merely one aspect of this.

In a virtual world, one may fly a jetfighter, explore other planets, manipulate the structure of molecules, and emerge victorious in a streetfighting competition. Our participation is secured to the degree that any limitations that might prevent interaction in these virtual experiences are removed. The more possibilities that are allowed for, the stronger the allure of the medium, and the greater our attendant participation and resultant satisfaction. Lanier confirms this to be the essence of VR—even, I might add, its underlying message:

All of us suffered a terrible trauma as children that we've forgotten, where we had to accept the fact that we are physical beings and yet in the physical world where we have to do things, we are very limited. The thing that I think is so exciting about virtual reality is that it gives us this freedom again. It gives us this sense of being able to be who we are without limitation, for our imagination to become objective and shared with other people. ²⁷

The freedom which Lanier mentions is one of the fundamental characteristics of this medium. Consequently, VR cannot succeed in a mass market to the extent that it attempts to precisely simulate physical reality. The physical world is inherently limited, and to the degree that we reproduce those limitations in virtual spaces we diminish the allure of "going" there. Constraints heat up the medium and make it less pleasurable.²⁸ William Bricken of the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory says, "VR is not a physical simulation. In fact, when you are building systems in order to get a physical simulation, what you do is take your VR and add constraints to it. Throw away the constraints and you're in something that's a bigger space than physical. We have new freedoms, we have new things to learn."²⁹ Even in entertainment products, simulations should invoke structures only to the extent necessary to give the bare illusion of reality. Laurel notes that "constraints should be applied without shrinking our perceived range of freedom of action: Constraints should limit, not what we can do, but what we are likely to think of doing."³⁰ Games which employ unnecessary obstructions lose their appeal.³¹ In jet simulations, one must necessarily be allowed to crash one's aircraft, but to engender participation the simulation must not be overly difficult to fly, and in the event of a crash there must be an infinite number of replacement aircraft at hand. In games involving personal combat, one must be permitted to win, and in the event of a loss one must be provided an infinite number of lives. The ultimate constraint, death, is necessarily removed for the game to have appeal and enjoin participation. Virtual sex must deliver some degree of erotic satisfaction without any hint of the ramifications inherent to irresponsible sexuality. For virtual sex to be entertaining, all sense of risk must be removed. Risk and consequence, as a general rule, are limits which constrain our freedom to participate and bridle any resultant pleasure. They are antithetical to (and even nonsensical in) the experience of a virtual world: "If you had felt that you had nothing to lose, wouldn't you have asked someone out on a date a lot earlier? Or tried a new game? Or explored a new city? Virtual reality offers a chance to do all these things (and more) in a safe environment."³² What is safe elicits greater participation and more vivid emotional rewards.

With risk and consequence, however, go a substantive ethic. To the degree that risk and consequence comprise limitations on experience, so does moral responsibility. Ethical considerations limit possibilities in VR. In fact, it is difficult to know what it would mean to adopt a substantive social ethic in a universe where I am the sole free agent. A sense of a social contract is not only nonsensical in such a setting, but it must be displaced by instrumental egoism if I am to pursue my own individual satisfaction to the greatest degree possible. In a world of virtual combat and adventure there is no capital punishment for my crimes, nor is there concern for the well-being of those whose lives I take. Even if remote users control the other combatants, the elimination of risk undermines the need for a social ethic. The vividness of the individual experience is paramount.

It is at this point that this final component of VR, the abandonment of constraints, begins to suggest broader social concerns. Aukstakalnis and Blatner offer the following illustration for the purposes of dialogue:

Imagine, then, a not-so-distant scenario in which two kids are playing together in a virtual sandbox. Half in anger and half just in jest, one child picks up a virtual baseball bat and smashes it over the other's head. The environment reacts appropriately: the aggressive child sees his friend's head split open and blood pours out. Suddenly, the head joins together again and the child appears all right. The injured child never felt a thing (they weren't wearing force feedback devices on their heads!), and the hit becomes just a part of the game. What, then, are the ramifications of this type of play?³³

To rephrase this slightly: If I feel that I have nothing to lose, why treat other people with dignity or sensitivity? All questions of content set aside (realizing that most virtual sandbox programs would not anticipate and therefore provide for this particular range of expression), the ramifications of this sort of behavior on real-world interactions are uncertain, but we can safely posit two alternatives. The first is that the realities modeled for us in the virtual world will influence our conduct in reality. Children who strike other children without risk or consequence in a virtual world are perhaps enabled to repeat their behavior in the real world. The more realistic the episode, the more coherently it represents an educational experience in deviant interpersonal conduct. More likely, though, this technology will not affect our behavior directly but will erode our valuation of the rights of others in more subtle ways and emphasize a hedonistic individualism—which is a primary impetus to consumption and therefore good news to those with marketing interests in this technology.

A second possibility for the influence of VR morality on real-world behavior is that it will provide an environment to vent frustrations in a healthy fashion. As Aukstakalnis and Blatne suggest, VR might allow that "the chance to play out fantasies in private actually relieves the violent tendencies that might otherwise come out in real life."³⁴ But as VR technologies improve, the distinction between "real life" and virtual experiences will blur. As it blurs, and the coherently depicted virtual experience is internalized, and perhaps amplified as a consequence of emotional or traumatic intensity, it may influence an individual more significantly than experiences in the sensible world. Time spent in VR may ultimately be more poignant, more vivid, than everyday life for a majority of Americans. Laurel points out that dramatic representations "are wholly contained in the realm of the imagination, yet they transport us to alternate possible perspectives and may influence us in ways that are more resonant and meaningful than experiences actually lived."³⁵ If so, which experience counts as "real," in emotional terms? Laurel's point is even better taken when such representations occur in a condition of sensory immersion, where a conscious sense of the system and interface has largely faded.

Using Lawrence Kohlberg's terms for purposes of clarity, we should note that adults typically adopt either conventional or postconventional moral perspectives, in which their individual situation becomes universalized with regard to any rational moral individual within a society.³⁶ In such perspectives, limits (such as the rights of others, extrapolated from one's own sense of rights) are assumed. VR controverts the logic of conventional and postconventional moral reasoning, however. The solipsism engendered in cyberspace detracts from any sense of social embeddedness or obligation to other human beings. In VR, the participant returns to a preconventional moral perspective—instrumental relativistic egoism—characterized by a desire to maximize satisfaction of one's needs and desires, to minimize negative consequences to the self, and a general hedonistic orientation.³⁷ Studies conducted by Kohlberg and Kramer reported evidence that, upon entering college, some adults temporarily "retrogressed" to preconventional instrumental egoism. We might venture a guess that, upon leaving behind the limits imposed during their home life in order to go to college, many found themselves without constraints and reacted predictably, until such time when "inner establishment of an identity or outer pressure to take responsibility in a role of work and parenthood lead the individual to a commitment as a ‘social contract' to a pattern of moral values now chosen voluntarily."³⁸ The retrogressive moral stage is instigated by a pseudoreality (the sense of being free from social constraints) that is accepted as valid. The fact that accepting this pseudoreality (or virtual
reality) as "real" reality resulted in pleasure for those studied emphasizes their vested interest in maintaining a preconventional posture until such time as external constraints became unavoidable.

I believe that the experience of virtual space, inherently free from external constraints, fosters a similar retrogression. As evidence, I would direct attention to Elizabeth Reid's study on Multi-User Dimension programs (MUDs), which are networked, multiparticipant games which create virtual worlds within which many of the usual social mechanisms apply.³⁹ Reid notes that behavior in MUDs tends toward a general disinhibition, including a greater tendency to aggressive and disrespectful behavior, as well as increased intimacy. Participants in this environment

...are more likely to behave without inhibitions while using MUDs than they are if engaging in face-to-face interaction. . . Protected by computer terminals and separated by distances of often thousands of kilometers, users are aware that there is little chance of a virtual action being met with a virtual response. . . Feeling safe, MUD users also feel free. They are free to act in a context divorced from external measures of response, be they positive or negative.⁴⁰

In all cases, however, social sanctions are present. Even in a MUD environment, social and technical conventions exist for the exclusion and shaming of miscreants. There also remains a perception of reciprocity; users know that their hostility is vented upon actual human beings. While there is necessarily a physical disengagement in these virtual environments, there is no virtuality with respect to emotional participation. The emotional response to being abused on-line is, for many participants, traumatic. In spite of the social demands implicit in multiparticipant virtual worlds, the message of the medium itself may contravene a high level of moral conduct. And were it not for the existence of at least a few constraints (like the capacity to exclude overly offensive users), we might anticipate an even greater shortfall in socially responsible behavior. For the majority of participants, MUDs provide a pleasurable pseudoreality free from risk, consequence, and a substantive ethic—a pseudoreality which is accepted as real, and which consequently impacts real social interactions. The consequences of these social interactions, though occurring in a virtual environment, are felt as poignantly, for some, as events in the real (off-line) world. In some cases, this world without ethical constraints becomes their principal point of sociality and cultural embeddedness.

The question which remains is the degree to which the message of this medium will influence society. McLuhan implies that the history and development of media technologies can be seen as actualizing a society without limits.⁴¹ The telephone brought the walls down which separate humans in discourse. The phonograph brought the walls down which separate our homes from music hall performances. Television removed the walls that keep us isolated from events which happen moment by moment around the globe. In VR the final set of walls comes down, as we not only have the world brought into our homes, but we, from inside our homes, can enter into the world. But it is a world without constraints, and which may prove wholly unamenable to them. As we participate in these virtual worlds—pseudorealities which are presented to our consciousness as coherent realities—we cannot emerge unchanged.

As the technology of VR continues to develop, the cultural and social impact of its underlying message will be more keenly felt. This message is integrally connected to the concept of pleasure or psychological fulfillment without constraint, a natural consequence of participation in an environment created for the very purpose of escaping the inherent limitations of the physical realm. The greater the transparency of the interface—including a detachment from physical constraints, risk, and consequences—the greater our participation and therefore our resultant fulfillment and pleasure. Consciousness of constraints, both physical and ethical, mitigate a sense of participation and are therefore antithetical to the medium's essence. What is developed as a more transparent human-computer interface enjoins a freedom inconsistent with a substantive ethic. This message emerges in spite of the "seriousness" of the purpose to which this medium is applied. Preconventional moral reasoning may be a necessary byproduct of the egoistic freedom engendered by the interactive experience of cyberspace. While we can only speculate as to the future of this medium in technological terms, its social impact follows the message of the medium, not the range of applications to which it will be applied.

Notes

1. Quoted in Benjamin Woolley, Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 14.

2. See, for example, Steve Aukstakalnis and David Blatner, Silicon Mirage: The Art and Science of Virtual Reality (Berkeley: Peachpit Press, 1992), pp. 281-3, 306-7). The authors' comments are necessarily limited to the present form of the technology, of course.

3. While Leary has been wary to draw the connection (and any bad publicity) between VR and mind-altering drugs (see Woolley, Virtual Worlds, pp. 24-25), other VR aficionados have not been so cautious. Terence McKenna, called by Rushkoff the "successor to Tim Leary's psychedelic dynasty," states: "I link virtual reality to psychedelic drugs because I think that if you look at the evolution of organism and self-expression and language, language is seen to be some kind of process that actually tends toward the visible" (quoted in Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994], p. 57).

4. Howard Rheingold,Virtual Reality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 350.

5. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), p. 49.

6. A good overview of the wide variety of VR applications emerging can be found in Aukstakalnis and Blatner, Silicon Mirage, pp. 181-258.

7. McLuhan,Understanding Media, pp. 8-9.

8. Brenda Laurel,Computers as Theatre (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993), p. 187.

9. Cheris Kramarae, "A Backstage Critique of Virtual Reality," in S. G. Jones (ed.),CyberSociety: Computer-mediated Communication and Community (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1995), p. 37.

10. Mauro Figueiredo, Klaus Böhm, and José Teixeira, "Advanced Interaction Techniques in Virtual Environments," Computers & Graphics 17 (1993), p. 655.

11. Cf. Laurel,Computers as Theatre, p. 15.

12. See Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993), esp. pp. 31-52.

13. Ibid., p. 51.

14. Lanham,The Electronic Word, p. 84.

15. Laurel,Computers as Theatre, p. 204.

16. Some express the goal of VR as aimed at "providing a more direct communication link between users and the problem environment modeled by the computer system" (Figueiredo, Böhm, and Teixeira, "Advanced Interaction Techniques in Virtual Environments," p. 655). The creation of an illusory reality is therefore not the end, but is rather a means to an end, the end being a seamless interface with the system, with no consciousness remaining that the reality one inhabits is manufactured. While admittedly the present technology cannot (and may never) be able to provide a full sensory immersion to the degree that our perception of reality is completely befuddled, this is nonetheless the ideal of the technology.

17. Michael Heim, "The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace," in The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University, 1993), p. 85.

18. Allucquère R. Stone, "Virtual Systems," in J. Crary and S. Kwinter (eds.),Incorporations (New York: Zone, 1992), p. 619.

19. McLuhan,Understanding Media, p. 23.

20. Victor Burrill and Gillie Evans, "The Lust to Explore Space: The Attractiveness of Interactive Video Within Multimedia Applications," Computers & Graphics 18 (1994), p. 675.

21. Ibid., pp. 677, 679.

22. Aukstakalnis and Blatner, Silicon Mirage, p. 284.

23. See Herbert I. Schiller, "Media, Technology, and the Market: The Interacting Dynamic," in G. Bender and T. Druckrey (eds.), Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology (Seattle: Bay Press, 1994), pp. 31-45.

24. Ibid., p. 37.

25. Cited in Kramarae, "A Backstage Critique of Virtual Reality," p. 48.

26. Ibid., pp. 349-50.

27. Cited in Woolley, Virtual Worlds, p. 14.

28. Jacobson notes that "every constraint placed upon the participant reduces to some extent the quality of the virtual worlds experience for that participant" (Robert Jacobson, "After the ‘Virtual Reality' Gold Rush: The Virtual Worlds Paradigm," Computers & Graphics 17 [1993], p. 697).

29. Cited in Woolley, Virtual Worlds, p. 21.

30. Laurel,Computers as Theatre, p. 105.

31. Cf. Ibid., p. 167.

32. Aukstakalnis and Blatner, Silicon Mirage, p. 286.

33. Ibid., p. 285.

34. Aukstakalnis and Blatner, Silicon Mirage, p. 285.

35. Laurel,Computers as Theatre, p. 30.

36. Lawrence Kohlberg, The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 178.

37. Ibid., pp. 626, 659.

38. Ibid., p. 431.

39. MUDs are for the most part textual experiences, and so do not partake of the full immersive potential of VR discussed throughout this work. Unfortunately, these fully immersive forms of VR remain, for the majority of us, a future development. Still, as Reid notes, "Users treat the worlds depicted by MUD programs as if they were real. However, it is not the technological interface itself that sustains the willingness of users to treat this simulated environment as if it were real. Rather, it is the degree to which MUDs act not only as a tool for the expression of each user's imagination but mediate between the user's imagination and the communication to others of what he or she has imagined. . . Virtual worlds exist not in the technology used to represent them nor purely in the mind of the user but in the relationship between internal mental constructs and technologically generated representations of these constructs. The illusion of reality lies not in the machinery itself but in the user's willingness to treat the manifestations of his or her imaginings as if they were real" (Elizabeth Reid, "Virtual Worlds: Culture and Imagination," in S. G. Jones (ed.), CyberSociety: Computer-mediated Communication and Community [Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1995], pp. 165-66).

40. Reid, "Virtual Worlds: Culture and Imagination," p. 174.

41. See McLuhan,Understanding Media, p. 283.