Consequences of Virtuality: Philosophical Issues in Online Experience

In this paper, we draw on applied research conducted in the course of technology development to explore five issues in modern networked computing systems that pose interesting and often overlooked philosophical questions. Online, networked computing (such as the Internet) has created new structures of virtual experience that have received great attention at a high-order behavioral level but little attention for the structural implications that are of philosophical interest. Five philosophical themes related to virtual experience are loss of goals, loss of time, loss of place and body, loss of ethical agency, and loss of the integrated other. We consider the consequences of these phenomena for the development of technology and discuss data from ethnographic explorations of technology usage in the US, France, and China that demonstrate possible directions for the future. We hope to encourage further exploration of the philosophical issues highlighted by the five themes and their implications for technology

• Human-computer interaction and visualization