Communications and Cyberspace Chapter 5-7

Chapter 5

Virtual Reality has come with all of its effects and defects.  One of the main defects being the ethics behind Virtual Reality which no one could really control.  The book states "Today we have games on the drawing board and already on the market that offer the participants the opportunity to engage in extreme human behavior such as mutilation, rape and even murder".  This is now old news.  Every time there is a launch of a new video game such as Call Of Duty there are lines of hundreds of fans waiting to be the first ones to experience this game.  One side of the coin is that users are able to act on all of these kind of games and perform violent acts without really hurting anyone.  The other side of the coin is that these users can practice within a game to perfect their acts in real life.

Chapter 6

There is a huge problem within Virtual Reality, this being Moral Issues.  As stated in the book, "Moral issues include the right to enslave robots, the use of virtual reality as a tool for propaganda, and wether individuals will be held accountable for the actions they engage in while experiencing the medium."  This raises a huge concern for how people are going to be accountable for their actions.  One could simply wear the new glasses that are on the market now that allow a user to experience virtual reality, kill half a dozen people and claim that he did not know what he was doing since he was living a virtual world.  I can already imagine how many Lawyers would love to get their hands on this kind of case.  Lots of different agendas can arise from the Virtual Reality dramatism.

Chapter 7

As Virtual Reality begins to take part in more of our lives, we can see how images and emoticons are always needed in anything that we wish to share or express with others. I found two key phrases in the reading which could not be more true. " The use of icons in e-mail and news groups suggests that contemporary electronic writers are not interested in the distancing and ambiguity that prose offers.  Instead they want to give their prose a single voice and if possible a face." The other phrase is "Electronic technology is helping to change the communicative balance between word and image in our media.  It calls for a new relationship between (arbitrary) symbolic representation and perceptual representation.