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Technology is probably what separates us from all other living creatures, or at least sophisticated technology, such as machines. Yes, other organisms utilise simple tools and what have you, but none of them are going to the moon in any sort of hurry. Levy's work is essentially about artifacts, be they software like language or symbols, or hardware like tools and machines. However, following on from the work of philosophers such as Deleuze and Serres, Levy is profoundly against the two common (mis)conceptions about them: that they 'dominate' us, or that they are simple tools in our hands, doing our bidding. Heidegger and his ilk were very keen on the domination idea, but that's only because they didn't really understand machines; sure, your VCR will seem to dominate you, if you can't work it, as many older people will tell you, but after a good dose of swearing and fumbling the usual result is a machine that just sits there doing nothing. Hardly despotism. Or you may have its measure, and say it's just a tool for capturing video images, for whatever purpose, and yet it changes the way you watch TV, capture memories of your kids, and the entire institutional set-up of the film industry. Quite a clever tool, that.
If you read this book (and you should), Levy will tell you that all artifacts, including less 'material' ones like language, virtualise our lives. That doesn't mean making them less real, the common usage of 'virtual'; it means problematising them, opening them up to possibilities. Making them MORE real. And this isn't naive techno-optimism, because not only are not all these possibilities not nice, but when you virtualise something you take on-board the requirements of the virtualising medium, which have to be met to keep it running, and you become entwined with the other people associated with these artifacts, such as video repair men. Technology can truly make you feel like a god, but it always needs to be fixed, and you have to undertake profound social relationships for it to happen at all (nobody builds an aircraft carrier alone in their backyard). Or take our oldest and most 'simple' artifact: language. Language, says Levy, virtualises 'real-time', by which he means our everyday interactions with other people. That's what it means to 'discuss' something, you take an immediate issue confronting two or more people, and you use language to open it up to different resolution paths which aren't immediately obvious. And again, this isn't artifact as god or slave: the language doesn't dominate you, although it has in-built constraints which you must adhere to if you want to be understood, and you can't just tell people what to do and see it happen, because not only are allowed meanings consensual or social, but also there is no direct causal link between utterance and action.
Levy explores the way we virtualise every aspect of our lives, from real-time interaction through language, to our actions through technology, and our social relations through institutions. And in each case the mechanism is the same: we create some artifact, more or less material, which allows us to shift what's at stake away from the immediate here-and-now and towards a problematic where new possibilities open up. And again Levy avoids simplistic determinism of any persuasion by emphasising that each of these artifacts simultaneously creates new social arrangements, and introduces new imperatives through the need for their upkeep. This is how the philosophy becomes anthropology, and why Levy says to be human IS to be virtual; it is our species that has taken these artifacts into our collectives, that has used the world to mediate our social lives. And the world extracts a price too, because artifacts impose requirements back upon us, if we want them to keep working, that is. The end of domination, either of artifact by human, or human by artifact.
This is Levy's most accessible book, in English, relatively free of the sometimes over-blown prose of Collective Intelligence. Like Bruno Latour, also an admirer of Serres and Deleuze, Levy allows us to see exactly how our technological, modern world is every bit as religious, barbaric, enlightened, enchanted, mystical or whatever as it has always been; you just have to understand artifacts. (It is also a tremendous asset for philosophy students who don't fully understand the scope of the Begsonian/Deleuzean 'virtual'.)
And as another reviewer has hinted, there's even theology in nuts and bolts, if you know where to look.
That the book produces its profound cognitive effect in so few words is stunning. Part of the credit for this feat must go to the translator, Bononno.
'Becoming Virtual' in my view surpasses that other classic,'Understanding Computers and Cognition' by Winograd and Flores. Lévy depicts cognition and action as both social process, and process occurring within the individual. He introduces concepts sparingly and tellingly, illustrating them with examples reaching from the dawn of the human era to the present day.
A book that can be read at one sitting, but will demand to be picked up again many, many times in the years ahead.
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produce monographs, particularly tenure and in some cases
prestige. Even so, it is possible to produce competent
work that is precise and offers empirical evidence as well
as the insights of other scholars. That is to say, the best
academic work combines actual research with commentary on the
work and writing of one's peers.
Levy's _Cyberculture_ offers neither. It is a pretentious,
pompous exercise in self-aggrandizment that masquerades as
scholarly writing. The book lies in the tradition of McLuhan
and Nostramdomus, in that it offers prognostications and
claims for experientiality without much evidence. Many
technical details are shoddy or wrong, and there is a stunning
lack of detail that suggests the author might not have spent
much time exploring the current state of "cyberspace". To take
one example, the author's position that the importance of
the Internet for digital music is really related to its potential
for collaboration holds little weight against the massive
current use of it for music distribution, the production of
Def Leppard's _Eupohoria_ notwithstanding. Levy presents
no backing for his claims, and seems to ignore what's currently
happening.
Like all academics, the author attempts to create and define
the terms of his own debate. Scholars do this now so that
they can have something to write about, first off, and second
to attempt to form a legacy (in that other scholars will quote
them). Levy's attempt is centered around the Internet
as "Universality Without Totality", and of course these terms
are highly suspect and open to contention. Whither the
Digital Divide? Not here. Just like the lack of proper
documentation for sources in text. Just like any intellectual
merit beyond self-indulgence and blind seer-work. Proper
education teaches us to be wary of claims for universality,
and if Levy had stopped for a moment to consider the lack of
Third-World internet providers, or even the disenfranchised
in North America, he would have understood that there IS a
totalizing dimension to the Internet, which revolves around
ACCESS, the terms of which are CAPITAL and to a less extent
PRIVILEGE.
In short, there are many superior works on the impact of Internet
technologies on society. All of them are necessarily premature,
as Communication History teaches us that the printing press,
television, radio, and every other new medium took years to
"settle out" (it's called the "Incunabula" period). Still,
it's possible to use empirical research to understand the
current state of affairs with its concommitant implications.
It's also possible to skip merrily through some terms of
your own devising, making broad claims that bear tenuous
connection to lived reality, which Levy does par excellence.
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