In his book Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson describes
cyberspace as being a consensual hallucination. There has
to be an agreement by readers to allow themselves to participate
in the virtual environment of reading. Reading, in this sense,
is assumed to be virtual the readers' minds create the world of
the novel through their imaginations, and it is this imaginatory
world of the virtual space that has been consensually agreed upon
to be a hallucination.
The same applies to the virtual environment of the internet.
Echoing the ideas and words of media theorist Marshall McLuhan--what
appears on the screen isn’t real. The images and worlds that we
think we see on a TV or computer screen are actually visualized
within our mind’s eye, thus reducing all that we see on the screen
to a hallucination. To support his argument, McLuhan uses the
standard cathode-ray TV set as his example. He says that there
is never a complete image on the screen because the cathode ray
paints the back of the screen every 30th of a second. By
doing this, the cathode ray paints half of the screen each time,
and for the image to appear complete, your mind fills in the faded
half of the screen. A similar example can be made of old film
projectors and cinema. Film shows us a series of still framed
images, and runs them past us at a speed in which they appear
to be moving as one complete image; in fact, they are separate
frames, and our minds work to complete the movement of this virtual
show.
Taking this into account, George
Landow says:
| [A]ll texts the reader and the writer encounter on a computer
screen exist as a version created specifically for them while
an electronic primary version resides in the computer's memory.
One therefore works on an electronic copy until such time
as both versions converge when the writer commands the computer
to "save" one's version of the text by placing it in memory.
At this point the text on screen and in the computer's memory
briefly coincide, but the reader always encounters a virtual
image of the stored text and not the original version itself;
in fact, in descriptions of electronic word processing, such
terms and such distinctions do not make much sense. |
We can see that the reader is not reading the actual text, but
is reading a virtual representation of the original text.
|
