ABSTRACT
Does technology change the way in which exchange operates in social relationships? As people in the second half of the twentieth century came to terms with the possibilities of electronic communication, from music recordings to the internet café, some scholars suggested that the world had grown smaller and that intimacy remained possible across great distances creating what McLuhan (1964a) named a global village and later scholars theorized as ‘ethnoscapes’ (Appadurai 1996) or as the ‘traffic in culture’ (Marcus and Meyers 1995). The global village is ‘virtually’ a village. It requires that everyone in it bear an image of their intimate collaborative participation in constructing the village through technological mediums, but at a larger scale than before. This chapter examines the exchange of knowledge in virtual reality as a form of interaction that suspends disbelief in the possibility of face-to-face intimacy across great distances. Virtual reality interfaces those forms of sociality with technology and cultural media, as common as radio and television and as ‘exotic’ as cyberspace. In McLuhan’s understanding of virtual reality people emphasize how their relations are meaningful, rather than what they mean, and so they convey meaning.
