from the really virtual to the virtually real.
In the early days of the Internet, circa 1996, it appeared that the material world was going to evaporate into the virtual. John Perry Barlow and others announced that they now “lived” on the “frontiers of Cyberspace.” But now, in the era of Web 2.0 (are we now approaching Web 3.0 perhaps?), precisely the opposite has occurred: instead of vanishing into a matterless state and a stateless matter, the flow has reversed, and we increasingly live in a material world saturated by the virtual.
Instead of bodies dissolving into data, data has become more and more a part of the real. Touch-screens, mobile devices, projectors, and wireless signals increasingly surround us, matrix-like if not quite yet Matrix-like. They don’t beam us up anywhere but surround us with beams. The question remains, however, for us—and not the machines—to determine: are these beams of light or prison bars?
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