Kiddie VR

Research shows that 8-year olds misunderstand approximately half of what they see in movies, yet Jaron Lanier is intent upon introducing children as young as six to the most advanced form of VR imaginable. Ironically, many VR promoters are not taking heed of what children themselves have said about advanced telecommunications. Robert Hercz writes in an article for Canadian Business, "Wired Child:"

Daniel, 18, was a computer user at the age of six, a professional consultant at 12. What he wants from his computer can be summed up in one word: Doom.

And, in the same article, Daniella, aged 11, underlines the possible incidence of pathological narcissism and social autism:

The coolest computer can make myself really, really famous. And it would have theatres and malls in it. And it would be called Daniella.

We know next to nothing about the affects of electronic instruments upon adults let alone children. And while The Pentagon and Nintendo, among others, underwrite VR advance, there is currently no systematic research agenda or response for studying the affects of VR on individuals and groups. Consequently, the contemporary electrocrat is inadvertantly utilizing telecommunications which affect fundamental states of awareness.

We are simply not educating ourselves to meet the challenge of our machines. We need to be more circumspect regarding complex inventions like VR, not less. We are losing sight of the fact that new technologies affect the individual in ways that can lead to cultural desocialization, depersonalization, detatchment, dissociation and regression.

We have not yet come to terms with the social transformation initiated by television, and are still in the throes of the computer revolution. Television is largely irreversible. It is a technology which is not easily dismantled socially or psychologically. And it is devastating in its cognitive affects. Television habitualizes negative psychological states like "disordered thinking," "distorted thinking," and "magical thought." It negatively influences cognitive development in areas of creativity, acquisition of vocabulary, spatial ability and general intelligence, and it negatively affects critical thinking, especially in terms of elaborating, analogizing or making logical inferences. Taken together, these unconsciously transform the individual's construction of reality.

Computer technology, too, is largely irreversible. Instead of the television receiver and electron ray gun determining the content on the screen, the computer operator takes control of reception and the gun. When we watch television, we learn to think like a television receiver. When we work at a computer terminal we learn to act like a television sender. Users think and act within media, and in the long term, each medium favors certain psychological and sociological processes. Such processes transform the social construction of reality. The convergence of television and computer into VR will only expedite and exacerbate the neological spasm that is already taking place.

The fact is that we are all children when it comes to evaluating reality in cyberspace. In the article "I'm Not a Real Doctor, but I Play One in Virtual Reality: Implications of Virtual Reality for Judgements about Reality," university researchers Michael Shapiro and Daniel McDonald write that communication and social psychology investigators have identified two different aspects for reality evaluation: physical reality and information reality.

Objects are considered to be physically and objectively real if two or more people agree about their physical reality. If two or more fail to agree, then an error in reality judgement is assumed. Television, computers and VR are such recent innovations that there is very little consciousness of what constitutes their physical, objective reality. Consequently, experience of them is considered to be subjective, and their social experience a "consensual hallucination."

In the social construction of reality, representations of information have degrees of reality to the extent that they are shared and understood. Such information reality is always abstract, and can include, for example, adult concepts of government and economics. The most extreme manifestation of information reality, according to some researchers, is cyberspace, wherein all truly physical objects disappear and only information remains. Moreover, there is no consensual or social agreement about the objectivity of any information reality let alone that of cyberspace.

What isn't generally noted is that abstract concepts disappear in cyberspace as well. Notions of traditional government and traditional market management have disappeared where Internet and institutional computer processes are concerned. Computer innovations in the world's financial system have dissoved traditional barriers of regulation, geography, custom and markets. What this should signal is a vote of non-confidence for general government and economics. What it actually signals is a complete loss of contact between abstract and concrete social reality. Neither message has been received by global citizenry.

Oddly enough, it is thought that VR-Information-Reality, when more-fully realized, will allow for the reinstitution and reapplication of traditional social contracts. This is a great mistake. When concrete social culture departs into a wholly abstract, subjective realm, it becomes wholly irrational. VR allows people to think and act directly upon one another as if they are electronic instruments -- that is the appeal of cybersex. However, since thought and action is irrational in VR, it should not dictate any concrete social consequence. There sould be some sort of offical provision regarding VR and social deportment before VR becomes as pervasive as television or the computer.

While there is little general consensus, researchers have agreed unanimously that people of all ages are not very good at recognizing the difference between the perception of reality and that of mediated reality. According to Shapiro and McDonald, so much is known about the media influence on the construction of reality that a full discussion was beyond the scope of their article. On the other hand, they admit next to nothing is known about the psychological mechanisms involved.

Those who are most directly affected by decisions regarding telecommunications are children, particularly in their sense of personal and social reality. This is because children's reality judgements are limited by immature information-processing strategies, and by knowledge and experience deficits. Ironically, for both children and adults, the problems with VR and "reality reconstruction" accrue in two directions: the potential of VR to move toward greater fidelity to physical reality, and to move away from physical reality.

At the moment, sensory VR is visually biased. What will it be like when it is haptic (touch-based), kinesthetic (related to joints and muscles) and visceral (related to the internal organs)? What, in other words, will it be like when people believe that they feel things that they do not? VR is a matter of computer feedback; one individual's feedback can conceivably be converted and fed to another. The idea behind VR communications is not only to make people "physically" accessible over time and space, but to make people "mentally" accessible as well.

At the other extreme, the inventor of the first computer graphic program, Ivan Sutherland, has said:

A display conncected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world... There is no reason why the objects displayed by the computer have to follow the ordinary rules of physical reality... The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter.

So what will happen to our conceptions of physicality and mentality under such conditions, even of our conceptions of imagination, fantasy and metaphysics? It is likely the earlier and the more extensive the exposure of an individual to VR, the greater the cognitive process for fundamental conceptualization will be impeded and distorted.

While Shapiro and McDonald acknowledge that VR has potential to create an extremely rich perceptual and cognitive environment, they caution that it may tax mental capacities. They emphasize that sensory excitement and stress will cause people to accept the unreal as real because they won't have the capacity to check for veracity.

In order to rationalize the affects of VR, the academics resort to theories regarding hallucination and the breakdown of physical and mental processes in the mentally ill. Why should that be surprising? Telecommunications decontextualize sensory information. Sensory decontextualization distorts cognition and decision-making. Heavy users of media inevitably shift their attention to distorted, decontextualized experience. Such mediated experience is less-likely to be used in reality reconstruction. The more time we are immersed in media distortion, the less time we have to generate perceptions of objective reality. Then again, the more realistic the representation, the more believable it becomes, and the more likely it is to be used in reality reconstruction. So much for VR and "Reality Judgements."

Post-script: many adults who have spent a great deal of time in VR have "flash-backs" like drug- and stress-induced affects. In addition, some children who are veterans of computer games have experienced something not unlike post-traumatic stress syndrome. Apparently, not only do we become ghosts in the machine, but our thoughts come back to haunt us. And yet we seem eager to introduce children to our synthetic nightmare. Such sanctioned personal and social abuse may make child abuse seem innocuous by comparison.