Technology, Virtuality, Representation

i-Studio 5 seminars, seminar 1: 27 February 2002
Dr Jannis Kallinikos LSE

This presentation will focus on virtual worlds and a few crucial presuppositions underlying their emergence and diffusion. Virtual worlds will be viewed as springing from contemporary technology's reappropriation of three distinct traditions of socio-technical practices: those of industrial technology and engineering; writing and notation; and mediated orality and image making. While it inherits essential aspects of these traditions, contemporary technology (ICT) recombines them in innovative ways that establish a distinct infosphere that we often refer to as virtuality.

However, rather than being surrogate infoversions (ie symbolic versions) of reality, virtual worlds are highly selective or oblique forms of reframing social, cognitive and material relations. Virtual worlds' distinctive mode of being is closely tied to the highly selective premises by which contemporary man frames, posits and acts upon the world.

In virtuality, contemporary technology reflects, perhaps more clearly than ever, the most fundamental technological and modern predisposition: that of conquering the world as picture (bilt) (Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology). By the world as picture is meant not a picture of the world, but the world conceived as picture. Virtual worlds are world versions but not versions of the world. They partake of the world, strike back to it and shape it in various ways.

Background readings

• Kallinikos, J, 2002 Recalcitrant Technology: cross-contextual systems and context-embedded action (PDF)
• Kallinikos, J, 1998 'Organized complexity: posthumanist remarks on the technologizing of intelligence', Organization 5/3: 371-396
• Kallinikos, J, 1995, 'The archi-tecture of the invisible: technology is representation', Organization, 2/1: 117-140

^