Why Virtual Life in the Pandemic Sucks
By Tianyi G
Whether we like it or not, the pandemic has changed the way we live our lives. Quarantines and social distancing measures force us to stay in our rooms much of the time. We rely on our various electronic devices more than ever. They serve as entries to the “virtual world” in which we socialize with friends, gain entertainment, etc. Our daily activities, ranging from work to dating, are mostly taking place in it right now. Organizations and individuals are all trying their best to build this digital realm into a replica of our “real world”. I must not be the only one who’s hearing about the connection-building events. However, people are still complaining every day. Is there anything that we can do in the real world but not in the virtual world? My first reaction to this would be, everything.
Social media, games, and all other sorts of digital activities have been playing a central role in people’s lives for a long time. They used to offer us ways of doing the impossible. Slaying dragons, how cool is that? No one ever complained about these experiences. However, it is only when we try to use them as a substitute for our boring real world, we spot the one fundamental flaw in our attitudes when interacting with the virtual reality. It is never us directly interacting with it. Although we often assume a direct relationship, a distance, a gap nonetheless lies between us and the virtual world. The dissatisfaction and uneasiness we feel are our unconscious realization of this false assumption. What do I mean by this?
In a short piece named “Days of the Living Dead”, Slavoj Žižek articulates a similar point by analyzing what he calls “cyber space” with his usual Lacanian approach. He claims that in order to engage in the cyberspace, one has to “accept being represented in cyberspace by a signifying element with runs around in the circuitry as your stand-in”. (173) That is, whenever one wishes to do anything in the so-called cyberspace, it is always a representation of oneself that actually executes the action in that realm. When one says one slays a dragon in a video game, one is taking the character who signifies him to be oneself. However, Žižek thinks that a true identity between the stand-in and the person is never possible because the cyberspace will always be the mediation between these two and thus forever separates them (173).
To comprehend this, I ask readers to recall the time when a bug occurs in-game when the character stops moving despite you cursing on the side. Isn’t this in some sense analogous to the Heideggerian moment of the broken hammer? We recognize the difference between ourselves and our symbolic stand-ins in the precise moment of the dysfunctioning of the digital realm, and we come to realize how the past smooth “harmonies” are all provided by and relied on it. It’s always there, but only in the glitches, we notice its existence. This effect is even more obvious nowadays as the virtual world is expected to take over the role of providing us with every familiar task. No one really fully assumes the character in a game to be oneself. The content of the games is just too outlandish for anyone to believe in it. However, in a Zoom meeting, when the character looks exactly like you and sounds exactly like you, do we still retain that very last bit of hesitation of taking the representations to be us? I don’t think so. Only when the internet breaks down, we notice the difference. That’s why we don’t like this forced total takeover of the virtual space. We don’t feel safe enough. The operation of life now depends on something that keeps reminding us of its inability to provide a fully immersed experience all the time. It is an unstable world. We are eager to go back to the actual world where we interact with things as ourselves all the time.
One question now occurs to me, if the digital world ever advances in a way that never glitches, will we still have the chance of distinguishing the representations from ourselves? In other words, in the safe, promising reality, are we really entitled in thinking it is we that act? Now I look back at the question posed in the beginning, I’m much less confident in giving the answer that I initially proposed.
