Notes on What Is Real and Not Real in the Digital and Real Worlds

Blue bar

Well, on the schedule, I titled this week "What Is Real and Not Real in the Digital and Real Worlds." Now, let me try to explain what I mean by that.

Looking at the Digital Karnak and Persepolis sites, that might give you something of an idea of what I mean. Those digital projects are about as close as most of us are ever going to get to actually experiencing those physical locations, and we can't experience Persepolis at all since there is nothing really left of it. There are many such sites now on the web; sites that preserve what is no longer real in the reality of the digital world. That might be images; it might be text; it might be video; it might be audio. In any case, the original might no longer exist in the real world--I see l that I am getting close to Plato's allegory of the cave.

And actually, the real world may be getting close to the digital world with the development of virtual reality goggles/viewers, like the one now being offered by Samsung.

The nagging aspect of the issue of web reality that I have is what happens to reality when something real is digitized. In my campus HIS 102 class, I like to have students work with the Slatington newspaper fragments in three different ways. First, students actually handle the crumbling, yellowed fragments--they stain your hands and smell. Second, I have students just view images of the digitized fragments (still off color). Third, I have students just look at a *.pdf file of a complete edition of the paper. I then try to judge the students' differing experiences, and their experiences are different in those three cases. Students have a different appreciation, or feel for the past, when they actually have to handle (and smell) the real fragments, because it is immediately clear that the fragments are simply old. When you are looking at the pdf version of the newspaper, that's when the question of reality becomes problematic; what is real or not real (because you know that newspaper edition was real at one time, but now it no longer is). My problem is that I have not been able to phrase the right questions to students to really get an understanding of what is going on with their understanding of the differing states of abstracted reality. You see that I am still struggling to be precise in my question of how real is the digital experience?

I think that there is a similar problem with just about anything digitized, images, music, texts, objects, paintings, and I wonder if philosophers have dealt with this issue of real versus not real in the digital world--I don't think that philosophers really do those kinds of questions any longer. It (the real v. the artificial real) reminds me of a scene in a kind of bad Sylvester Stallone movie, Demolition Man, when the Stallone character experiences sex in virtual reality. What is real and not real in the digital world?

One last comment about digital newspapers

On this week's schedule, I have included one last reading about digital newspapers. I have done this because it is hard to underestimate how important these newspaper collections are to historians and genealogy researchers. The problem is that they have got to be made more widely available. (Maybe a better, or easier, way to pay for using a digital collection needs to be adopted.) It would also be interesting if there were more penny and tabloid newspapers digitized. Remember not everyone was reading the New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Richmond Times Dispatch, etc. People read a lot of less-intimidating newspapers (and they still do today).

Suggested Reading

 

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