Questions of the Virtual (Baudrillard)

An investigation of the virtual world is an important undertaking for urban theorist today.  We now negotiate our lives with the aid of the many forms and mediums that make up the "information superhighway" ie mobile phones, facebook, internet sites and services.  One of the main focuses of interest here, given that these technologies change the way in which we experience the world, is presented by the question how does the virtual world in turn affect the way in which we need to design the spaces we use.

To consider the "virtual world", however you may define it, as a reflection of the real is perhaps an outdated concept.  Now the virtual world is an entity onto itself.   

"The virtual coincides with the notion of hyper-reality.  Virtual Reality, the reality that might be said to be perfectly homogenized, digitized and "operartionlized", substitutes for the other because it is perfect, verifiable and non-contradictory. ... 

We no longer have the good old philosophical sense of the term, where the virtual was what was destined to become actual, or where the dialectic was established between the two notions." (Baudrillard, Jean - "The Virtual")

Can the virtual present a dialectical or ideal version of our own will? If so, what are the driving forces? and what do they expose about our current value system?  I am not sure at the moment, but I have a few ideas, (more to come in later posts)

One other important element raised by Baudrillard is of a much more fundamental question... 

"...the peculiar irony there is in the fact that these technologies, which we associate with inhumanity and annihilation, will in the end, perhaps, be what frees us from the world of value, the world of judgement. ...

At the stage we are at, we do not know whether technology, having reached a point of extreme sophistication, will liberate us from technology itself - the optimistic viewpoint - or whether in fact we are heading for catastrophe.  Even though catastrophes ... assume happy or unhappy forms." (ibid)

For me this closing statement highlights an important questions that as far as I know is not yet addressed properly in contemporary discourse of technology, and the is the simple question of whether or not we can sustain the rate at which technology is produced, utilized and understood.  For me the real question of investigation should be two things, 

1. What is the value of technology, or; what is the aim of technology production and utilization? and;

2. Do we really understand the implications of what we are employing, or perhaps more fundamentally; do we know where we want to go?