I’m a big fan of Margaret Verthein’s The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace also (but you forgot to put quotation marks around her work cited).I think that the most pertinent questions to ask about any medium is what can its use tell us about the state of the culture and society in which we actually live today? Of course the medium, be it VR or Film or whatever is going to be used for commercial purposes because this is the nature of the country in which we live, possible the most deeply conservative Western nation at the moment. I was talking to an author the other day about the quality of some of the discussion surrounding new media.
People have been grappling with the ‘real’ and the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ or whatever for a millennium. Knowledge is something that is built upon other knowledge and VR did not come out of nowhere, it comes out of our culture, it is acculturated and is built upon a rich history that is worth exploring. Possible the reason that VR is not being used for other purposes is because of the demographic in which it is situated. Most people who deal in text, someone like Christopher Koch…one of Australia’s
most renown authors, would be lucky to have earn’t 20K last year. Why is this? A book is VR.
There are about twenty thousand PR people in Australia, yet 10 years ago there were only 400 professional historians.. now there are only 200. Why is this? If you use any medium to enrich, to empower, or to actually give something back then you will always be marginal in a society like ours. Who watches SBS? Technology follows culture and although culture is informed by technology it is not determinist. It is a US centric didactic arrogance that says that Australians are incapable of independent minds. Technology as progress is a very old-fashion 50s notion, well suited to Howard’s battlers. Technology as past…now this is avant garde…….