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Technology: Real v. Virtual Essay

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Computer based technology are moving us into a world where the real is gradually being replaced by the virtual. Do you agree or disagree.
Give examples.

What was impossible before has become possible now. With the swept of the wind computer based technologies have moved us from the real world to a virtual one and I very much agree with this statement. When talking of virtual reality, Barie Sherman and Phil Judkins describe it as ‘truly the technology of miracles and dreams’. (Bell,2000:113).We cannot make our real world whatever we wish to make it but we can hide in virtual reality and dictate our terms on it and make it our world, the way we want it. We are living in the twenty first century and can’t think a world without …show more content…

It enables people to experience what it feels like to be of the opposite gender or to have no gender at all reflecting on the ideas about how gender shape our expectations.

The Internet has paved ways for relationships to exist disembodied from the reality that exists outside the temporal and spatial world we inhabit.It has the capacity to involve humans into a reality which has the appearance of reality but not the substance of reality. There is no bodily interaction but simulation and virtualization. For example, an American wife was sued for divorce by her husband on alleged adultery in cyberspace when she was found flirting with a man and swapping erotic fantasies over the Internet whom she had never met.(Loader,1998:114). From this instance we can see where the virtual world is taking us and how it has become a part of life. It is substituting the real reality of virtual life. Instances like individuals adopting different personae and gender identities in contrast to their real embodied world identities, thereby deceiving people have become rampant. The disembodied reality of virtual world offers self-respect and satisfaction to some people. There have been instances where people have entered into Internet relationships and have got married and also where people have been tortured due to such relationships. In

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