Virtual

In common parlance, to classify or describe something as virtual is to contrast it with what is real. The real is characterized by physical, tangible qualities that can be observed empirically. The virtual represents—re-presents, copies, simulates—the real. 

Consider, for example, the concept of co-presence: two or more people sharing the same space at the same time. Real copresence is most obviously registered through the senses: the capacity to

see, hear, touch, and smell those whose presence one is sharing. In contrast, virtual copresence describes the sense of sharing time and space, even though one has indirect and limited access to those

who appear to be present, while quite possibly being far away, asleep, unaware of you, or doing something else. 

A telephone call suggests a virtual

copresence of voices, but not of sight, touch, or smell. A videoconference offers an opportunity to see and hear others, almost as if they were present, and yet they remain physically untouchable and

environmentally dislocated.

The virtual is sometimes spoken of as a degraded form of the real or original. It is argued that even though virtual entities, events, and communications may at times offer a convenient substitute for the real, they can never convey the multidimensionality of actuality. 

From this perspective, the inevitable failure of mimetic correspondence between the virtual and the real dooms the former to epistemological and aesthetic impoverishment.

In complete contrast to the previous perspective, others argue that virtuality serves to supplement the original. While the real can only ever be an approximation of its ideal, the virtual can be designed to correspond to ideal qualities. An avatar, for example, can be revised and refined until it conforms to an aesthetic ideal. 

Or, in a virtual economic model, actors can be designed to behave in accordance with economic laws rather than in the less predictable ways that characterize real

market behavior. In this sense, virtuality is seen as a way of resolving the incompleteness of reality; in Jean Baudrillard’s terms, it constitutes a form of

hyper-reality.

A third notion of the virtual sees it neither as degradation nor supplement of the real, but a playful space of counterfactuality in which alternative realities can be imagined, designed, or acted out. In

this sense, the virtual should not be evaluated in terms of whether it adequately reproduces the original, but regarded as a utopian or ludic counterreality. For example, Second Life should not be judged on the basis of whether it replicates the real world; it is supposed to be an alternative real

world, appealing precisely because it is unaffected by many of the physical and cultural constraints of known historical reality.

Two examples of the political use of the term virtual will help to illustrate the different ways in which it has been employed and understood. In British elections in the eighteenth century, only a

minority of the population had the right to vote.

They claimed to be voting not only for themselves, but on behalf of “the most poor, illiterate and uninformed creatures upon earth” (notes Edmund Burke in a letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe in 1792)

whom they believed lacked the ability to make political decisions for themselves.

 This act of disenfranchisement was known at the time as virtual representation. The suggestion here was that, while most people were disqualified from voting, their interests were being taken into account by an elite who understood them better than they did

themselves. 

In this sense, virtuality was intended to imply that the majority of British people, though physically absent from the electoral process, were somehow made present through the actions of others.

 Virtuality was used as a rationale for political exclusion, much like being offered a virtual tour of a building one would be unwelcome to enter physically. A more recent use of the term has been to describe the Internet as a potential public sphere.

Building on John B. Thompson’s theoretical account of mediatization as a process whereby “the exchange of symbolic forms is no longer restricted primarily to the contexts of face-to-face interaction, but is extensively and increasingly mediated by the institutions and mechanisms of mass communication”, some scholars have argued that citizenship is increasingly taking a virtual form, for example, in online social movements, online communities, and e-enabled relationships between governments and citizens. 

In the 1990s, the notion of the “Netizen,” as a virtual citizen, became fashionable, as did ideas of virtual politics and virtual democracy.  Unlike virtual representation, which sought to justify the absence of people from power by characterizing them as virtually spoken for, Internet-related virtuality has tended to be employed as a way of enhancing representation and participation. 

For example, by diminishing social cues that might lead to some people being ignored in the physical world, or allowing ideas to move globally without entailing the costs of international travel,  virtual communication broadens the possible range of democratic inclusion.

It is unwise to think of virtuality in a politically deterministic way. That is to say, being virtual neither empowers nor weakens citizens; it neither broadens nor constrains public spheres. 

Being virtual is historically contingent: In some situations, it allows people to engage in more meaningful communications that strengthen opportunities for consequential collective action; in other situations virtual interaction might be a poor substitute for physical intercourse. 

It is equally unwise to think of the virtual as being wholly decoupled from the real or physical; in most cases, acting virtually—such as sending an e-mail, taking a photograph, or joining a global movement—leads to social activities in the real world. 

Although some virtual experiences (such as online gaming) are fairly selfcontained, most are not. Being virtual can be seen as an extension of time-space distanciation, whereby relations between social actors have become increasingly disembedded from physical presence. 

This is one of the most conspicuous characteristics of modernity, giving

rise to a range of highly significant social reconfigurations, most notably globalization, with its virtual flows of finance, knowledge, and power.