Virtual Institutes: Between Immersion and Communication [chapter]

Klaus Sachs-Hombach, Jörg R. J. Schirra, Jochen Schneider
2003 Computational Visualistics, Media Informatics, and Virtual Communities  
In the two expressions "virtual reality" and "virtual community", the term "virtual" has different meanings. A virtual reality is a depiction or, more generally speaking, a sensuous representation of reality that allows -mainly by means of interactivity -to experience various features of reality without actually being in contact with the reality depicted. Therefore, any interactive depiction that is able to imitate reality to such an extent that a high degree of sensory-motor immersion becomes
more » ... ossible is called a virtual reality (Heim 1998, 6f). Since reality is always much more complex than its depiction and full of unpredictable surprises, hardly ever a user has doubts about the difference between the depiction and the thing depicted. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for preferring the imitation to the reality: at least, the imitation is usually not as dangerous as reality sometimes turns out to be. Virtual communities are virtual not in the sense described above. We do not take virtual communities to be merely depicted communities -although they might employ virtual reality aspects. They are indeed real communities, because the phenomenon called "virtual community" always and necessarily includes real persons and real communicative processes. Without real agents, real intentions, and real interactions, we would not speak of a community at all, but at best of a simulation of a community. What, then, is the difference between virtual communities and real communities? One important difference certainly is that virtual communities are mediated by some computer-based devices. But as one does not have the intention to call a video conference on the internet a "virtual conference" although it is transmitted by a computer, the computerized mediation alone is not sufficient to turn a community into a virtual one. We would like to suggest that a community is properly characterized by the term "virtual" only if (a) at least the mediating devices allow the participating persons to disguise themselves, and if (b) the participants are aware of this fact (in most cases). Therefore, within virtual communities you normally do not know neither the real name of the person you communicate with nor his or her real character but only the user name and the personality descriptions the user has made public.
doi:10.1007/978-3-322-81318-3_6 fatcat:x5rp7iykpff77kmu4snirxg7ei