ABSTRACT
Virtual space – and here I shall refer specifically to virtual reality – has been understood as either providing the means to enable greater freedom and autonomy (a place where one can choose an identity and play away from the material constraints of repressive society) or, in a more dystopian fashion, as dissolving and fragmenting the ‘whole person’, leading to greater alienation and estrangement from the self and others. These parameters have set the limits or boundaries through which virtual space has been theorised in wider sociological, philosophical and psychological perspectives, and has also entered everyday discourse surrounding the fears and fascinations attached to new communication technologies. Within contemporary ‘consumer-led’ marketing of technology, virtual space is offered as the site for enabling and maximising freedom and autonomy seen as both desirable and beneficial to humankind. Spanning mainstream representations such as the recent Microsoft commercials to more counter-cultural forms, such as the journal Wired, virtual space is the place where the digital revolution is happening, and technology is the new tool of transformation. The lure of freedom and power is seen to be in the hands of the consumer who need only be concerned with making the right ‘product choice’. In a utopian fashion, technology and its allied virtual space, are seen as providing liberation for the individual no longer chained by the shackles of everyday space and time. These are familiar arguments and it is not the purpose of this chapter to debate either the utopian or dystopian merits of virtual space, but rather to examine how particular notions of freedom and autonomy have come to define virtual space, and what relation those meanings attached to new technologies circulating within popular culture can tell us about the way we conceive of ourselves and the world in which we live.
