ABSTRACT
Most important in Erik Davis’s comment on what we might call the nondualizing effect of “the net of Indra,” by which he means “the punning leap” between the infinitely interconnected nature of reality according to the Flower Garland (Hua-yen) School of Chinese Buddhism and the seemingly infinite number of interconnections possible on the World Wide Web, is the slip into hyperbole about the degree to which the separation between human consciousness and machine language is being dissolved in the information age. Setting aside for a moment the digital divide by which the world is increasingly and unequally separated into information “haves” and “have-nots” (Castells 2001; Lenhart 2003; Loader 1998; Mossberger, Tolbert, and Stansbury 2003; Norris 2001; Wresch 1996), even in the world of those with Internet access, in most respects what is commonly (and I will argue inaccurately) called “virtual reality” is at best a cyber-shadow, an electronic reflection of real life. Shopping online may offer consumers more convenience, for example, but presents them with little more than catalogues accessed electronically. Personal banking online is more interactive, perhaps, with more options for managing household finances, but it offers little that is not available at one’s local branch. Even simply browsing
the Web reveals the inescapable connection between off-line interests and online searches for information. And, for all this, the Pew Internet & American Life Project (2003) still reports that by far the most common use of the Internet is simply sending and receiving e-mail. Online role-playing games, on the other hand, which in their MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing games) variant present arguably the closest popularly available electronic versions of “virtuality,” account for a very small percentage of daily Internet usage, and even these stretch the usefulness of the “virtual reality” concept. While I have certainly been guilty of this in past writings (e.g., Cowan and Hadden 2004b; Hadden and Cowan 2000a), in most instances to speak of virtuality and popular Internet usage both overstates the case for activity that occurs in computer-mediated environments such as the World Wide Web and blurs important technological distinctions between activity that does take place in “virtual reality” versus that which simply comes and goes online. Cinematically posed, this is the difference between Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999) and Irwin Winkler’s The Net (1995).
