[Air-l] Reification was Definitions

Mary K. Bryson mary.bryson at ubc.ca
Fri Oct 20 10:53:57 PDT 2006


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.





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