[Air-l] Reification was Definitions

[Mary K. Bryson]

So there are two things that are being intertwined here, and not profitably.
The first would be the non salutary reduction of virtual to online, and the
related binary of online-offline, that has also likely outlived its
usefulness as a seemingly clarifying binary.
The second is the meaning of "virtual" as a modifying adjective -- its
epistemic, and maybe ontological, and most definitely philosophical value.
Rob Shields -- amongst many others -- has written an excellent book that
provides an excellent overview of scholarly work on "virtual" as construct
(The Virtual). A construct can't be falsified - rather, its use contested.
So, communities can be analyzed as "virtual" that existed long before
anything like "online" - which one could argue is Benedict Anderson's
argument about "imagined communities" mediated by the artifact of the
newspaper.

So, what do we/you mean by "virtual"?

Mary


On 10/20/06 12:28 AM, "Sam Tilden" <tildensam at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Ascribing virtuality to communities of people who inter-relate on the internet
> are no less robust than those generated in "Realspace associations. Most
> evidence suggest communities form and are robust but are they virtual? The
> social scientists in our midst have affirmed the formation of communites that
> is not in dispute.
>    
>   On another note, scholarship, it seems to me, is about constantly seeking
> refinement for the understanding of basic principals. More often, like piety,
> just slightly out of reach.
>    
>   While there may not be agreement on what is knowledge, it is the quest that
> defines the role of scholarship. The people you mentioned may not have agreed
> on the precise details of the method but they did have a basic understanding
> that methods were necessary. One thing they did agree on is, to some degree of
> certainty, that the results once known would be observable by others.
>    
>   As I said earlier, unsuported assertions are either opinions or fictions no
> matter how elegant or literary.
>    
>   Communities yes, but virtual communities can be easily falsified.