Worlding

Identity, Media, and Imagination in a Digital Age

David Trend

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317248699
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Worlding brings ideas about "virtual" places and societies together with perceptions about the "real" world in an era of mounting global uncertainty. As mass media and the Internet consume ever-increasing portions of our lives, are we becoming disengaged from face-to-face human interaction and real-world concerns? Or is the virtual world actually bringing people closer together and making them more involved with social issues? Worlding argues that the "virtual" and the "real" are profoundly interconnected, often in ways we don't fully appreciate. Drawing on sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, media analysis, and technology studies, Worlding makes the argument that virtual experience and social networking can be vital links to utopian visions and an appreciation of the world's diversity.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

This book is about the worlds we visit in our minds and the ways these experiences shape our identities. The volume brings ideas about “virtual” places and societies together with perceptions about the “real” world in an era of mounting global uncertainty. Central to this project is the premise that virtual and real worlds are, in the final analysis, both products of mind and highly contingent on each other. This relationship between actual and imaginary worlds is the main concern of Worlding. Certainly the real world affects what we fashion in our imaginations, often providing a point of departure for fictional stories, adventure movies, and our most compelling computer games. But can virtual worlds have an effect on our actual day-to-day routines? Can stories and games help us fix real-world problems?

Virtual or Real?

At first glance, the connections between actual and virtual worlds might seem a bit vexing. One on hand, fictional worlds generally are set in seemingly realistic environments to make them appear plausible. Yet tangible experience can be depicted in ways that are anything but real. Factor in the differing ways we actually interpret what we see and hear, and the paradox of “worlding” becomes apparent. Variances in perception, culture, and literacy all enter the mix, demanding a recognition that the idea of a single “world” is at best an ideal and at worst a misguided delusion.

But this doesn’t mean we can’t make sense of it all. In fact, the many novel ways we possess of exploring fantasy landscapes and experiencing real-world events give us ever more potent tools for self-expression, personal insight, and, ultimately, intellectual growth. But it’s a tricky business figuring out how to use these tools or even recognizing them when we see them. This book is about the transformative power of virtual experience and its role in shaping human identity. Worlding makes the case that new technologies we experience every day through our phones, computers, and other devices extend a primal desire to replicate the perceptions of the human mind in physical form—in an effort to step outside ourselves and witness the phenomenon of existence. This is especially the case in the new generation of immersive worlds presented by computer games. Through the illusion of leaving the everyday world and inhabiting a virtual environment, we have the ability to live out our ideals and engage in our “real” lives with fresh perspective and insight.

A growing number of thinkers now believe that computer games—such as those played by a whopping 50 percent of the American public—teach us new ways of thinking, which can benefit the world in concrete ways.¹ The important difference between these new virtual worlds and prior media experiences lies in the active role played by the viewer. In conventional stories and movies, one enters the virtual world in one’s mind, but someone else scripts the actual experience. In the new virtual worlds, the viewer becomes the author of the story, actualizing the utopian vision and, in effect, living the dream. From this perspective the visitor to a virtual world has the radical capacity to look back on everyday experience and view it with fresh eyes—precisely because the utopian imagination always is a critique of the actual. Moreover, a growing number of computer games explicitly encourage players to directly engage and work to improve the nonvirtual world.

But none of this is easy. The instability of the worlds we carry around in our minds is heightened in an era of potent virtual experience. Movie special effects, sophisticated advertising gimmicks, immersive computer games, elaborate shopping malls, not to mention theme parks—all these offer a growing array of synthetic environments. Meanwhile, the world we consider the “real” one continues to be reshaped by human conflict, environmental change, shifting population demographics, urban renewal, and suburban sprawl.

In the “imaginary” world of stories and images, anything seems possible, as the illusionistic capacities of media and the Internet create ever more engaging narratives, games, and social networks. In the “real” world of people and places, things get bought and sold, actions have genuine consequences, and political events change the lives of people around the globe. Making things more complicated, these real and imaginary worlds constantly interact and influence each other. This means that keeping track of either world and remaining critically informed about each is a dynamic process in which the terrain is always shifting and the rules are continually changing. Conceptions of what is “imaginary” and “real” are fraught with debate, because the meaning of the terms can be unstable.

Worlding addresses the ways this evolution of our virtual and actual worlds has accelerated in recent years. The “imaginary” world has seemed to explode in its ability to render ideas into sounds and images, as well as in its creation of new platforms on which to fashion environments, human relationships, and novel forms of community. Meanwhile, events around the globe have reshaped the “real” world as never before, inverting traditional power relationships, redistributing populations and economic fortunes, and creating new paradigms of communication. As with any process of dramatic innovation and change, these events have had a mixed reception. Every celebration of the new world order and the emergent era of technological innovation has met a lament for fading tradition, values, and familiar ways of communicating.

Not that any of this is especially new. The interplay of real and imaginary worlds is as old as humanity itself—as are debates and suspicions about their relationship. The ability to represent ideas in symbolic forms like cave paintings is part of what distinguished early Homo sapiens from other creatures. From the earliest records of human reflection and philosophy, a mixture of wonder and discomfort has accompanied the impulse to make renderings of ideas and experiences. It is speculated that early humans attached magical beliefs to their depictions of hunting episodes on rocks and cavern walls—that somehow a picture of a desired quarry could bring it back again. Cultures around the globe would conceive religions and other belief systems that gave ideas form through ritual acts, images, and places of worship.

The human capacity to imagine has always been fraught with contradiction. As imagination has allowed people to imbue their thoughts with physical or oral form, products of the imagination have been contested throughout history as subjective or inauthentic. It seems we can never get a story or idea exactly right or render it in a way that satisfies everyone. Philosophers around the globe and throughout history have written about this curious disconnection between reality and perception. Plato and Parmenides pointed out that perceptions of the actual and the imaginary were different. Aristotle and Confucius observed that worldly experience was relative to the viewer. Siddhartha and Hegel added that our impressions change over time. Heidegger said that “the surrounding world is different for each of us.”² And Freud complicated matters further by suggesting that we live not in a common world but in a common thought process. Things have only gotten more complicated as media and communications technologies have created ever more vivid ways of seeing the real world and imaginary alternatives to it.

Worlding and Identity

Worlding is a way of thinking about identity. Obviously we live in one big world of continents and oceans that exists in a planetary solar system of other worlds—which themselves inspire all sorts of real and fictional thought. But back on planet Earth, one might say that society creates certain kinds of worlds for us, each with its own set of rules and characteristics. Nations, states, cities, and towns form some of these worlds. So do families, groups of friends, schools, and workplaces. A category one might call institutional worlds includes the stock market, the National Basketball Association, and the Catholic Church. Then there are worlds that exist only on paper or in electronic form, which configure themselves in our minds: children’s stories, news reports, TV shows, movies, e-mails, Facebook, Twitter, World of Warcraft, and so on.

All these many worlds are defined by boundaries and rules. Here is where worlding gets interesting. Because worlds generally correspond to groups of some kind—like populations or casts of characters—they are characterized by inclusions, exclusions, and the reasons or criteria through which group membership is defined. Narratives often hinge on a tension between insiders and outsiders, competing groups, or individuals in some kind of relationship to a group. Think of all the stories that emerge from issues of belonging, cooperation, competition, or conflict between groups defined by social class, nationality, race, gender, or where members live. Boundaries of worlds can cause tensions, as seen today around the globe in disputes over territory, governance, resources, rights, and immigration. Equally important are the rules that govern worlds. Just as laws and regulations structure everyday social behavior, story and game worlds are similarly organized. A player can’t begin to function in Halo, Resident Evil, or Spore without a knowledge of how to proceed.

The boundaries and rules of worlds—both real and virtual—are defined by belief systems: the consensus of understandings and values of those using or populating each realm. Obviously everyone inhabiting a municipality tacitly agrees that traffic laws need to be enforced. And a democratic political system implies that citizens have mutually decided what those laws dictate. But things aren’t that simple. As suggested above, the ways that worlds operate are subject to change as the beliefs and values of constituents shift over time. In the world of a computer game, rules can be updated or violated, or the world can be abandoned. In the civic arena, laws and government regulations undergo continual contestation and revision. Even the ways people treat each other in the worlds of families, work, and school continually shift and change.

Worlding is about this process of change—about the things that influence the boundaries and rules that affect individuals, groups, and the dynamics that define their worlds. It might be easier to say that this is a book about “ideologies,” or the belief systems that hold worlds together. But that wouldn’t be quite accurate. The concept of ideology always has had difficulty dealing with the communications envelope that surrounds it. An entire theoretical literature has tried to explain how sign systems, language, and media influence or fail to influence the way people see their worlds and treat each other. But most of that literature has failed to explain those processes adequately. More to the point, worlding today is significantly more complex than it was in the distant past or even as recently as a decade ago, now marked by new economic and political realities, enhanced media and technological capabilities, and people’s growing abilities to experience worlds like those offered by cell phones, satellites, the Internet, and digital visualization.

Worlding and its premises emerge from current discussions in philosophy, art, media studies, literary theory, sociology, education, and political science. Such intellectual discourses generally evolve their “new” findings from incremental refinements of insights developed over long periods. If there is a novelty to the concept of worlding, it lies in its synthesis of existing concepts. Each chapter of this book will detail prior thinking on the topics it discusses and then relate these ideas to interdisciplinary principles of real and virtual experience. This book addresses these growing complexities as manifested in seven areas.

Chapter 2, “World Systems of Thought,” addresses the philosophical dimensions of worlding, examining various concepts of the “real” world and the ways mental impressions of the world have varied and evolved over time. Topics include perceptions of the self in the world, states of consciousness, cross-cultural belief systems and religions, and the roles of science and creative expression. Utopias figure prominently in many world cosmologies by reflecting individual and collective attitudes toward the past, present, and future.

Chapter 3, “Consuming Desires,” discusses the inevitable role of consumption and trade in worlds of all kinds. Real-world economics manifest themselves most commonly these days in the interface of market capitalization and democratic politics, often with contradictory implications. In a society that encourages competition and individualism, ideals of community and the common good become devalued. The acquisition of things for private enjoyment supplants appreciation of human values like compassion and sharing and, ultimately, of society itself.

Chapter 4, “Mapping Media,” begins with the simple premise that world geographies are mapped and divided. But in the context of this book, such worlding has become virtual or ephemeral, largely due to technology, but not completely so. Entertainment media and other forms of digital communication allow people to know and experience more than ever before, but always through some mediating interface, some kind of gateway or filter, that has the capacity to limit or manipulate the experience.

Chapter 5, “Destination America,” uses a recently built “theme mall” in California as a point of departure for a broad-ranging discussion of cultural politics, urban planning, and the American Dream. In this instance a small bedroom community found itself powerless to resist the expansive imperatives of a notorious commercial developer bent on replicating a Disney-like world in the midst of several multiethnic, working-class neighborhoods.

Chapter 6, “Virtual Culture,” looks at the human drive for immersion in imaginary worlds—from ancient yarns and childhood stories to contemporary movies and computer games. Our desire for ever more convincing “virtual” experience can be seen throughout the history of art and representation. What drives this desire? More importantly, can immersion in artificial realities have an effect on what we perceive as the nonvirtual world? This section of Worlding argues that neat separations of “real” and “imaginary” need to be discarded in favor of an integrated understanding of the way these realms blend and interact with each other.

Chapter 7, “The Mean World,” describes the workings of authority in actual and virtual worlds. Power can become a misunderstood concept—in that its ubiquity in everyday life ironically can make it invisible. Everyone’s life is shaped by local and national government, as well as the power exerted by an employer or educational system or the sorts of control related to one’s income, age, gender, or ethnicity. Yet individuals also have power, although it is often unrecognized or undervalued. How do we connect the power of individuals to larger structures?

“Globalization” is that often abstract term for our larger world and its systems. Often people ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. World Systems of Thought
• 3. Consuming Desires
• 4. Mapping Media
• 5. Destination America
• 6. Virtual Culture
• 7. The Mean World
• 8. Globalization
• Index
• About the Author