Organic Frog

[Talking about magazines, I have a few comments to make about them… I think planners shouldn’t be reading any industry magazine: Campaign / marketing week for instance, or Strategies / CB News for the French readers… They are, to my humble opinion, most of the time a waste of time as they struggle to get the evolutions happening in our world. (Example here) Planning / industry blogs help me getting in touch with all the good stuff happening (campaigns, innovations…) and therefore I would rather like to focus on magazine adding more depth and thoughts provoking. Philosophie Magazine is definitely one of those and I would recommend you to read it if you can read French! (End of rant!)]

So I was saying how wonderful this magazine is and how it helped me understand more about the virtual notion and its implications for us as marketing professional.

If you take virtual worlds for example, people perceptions of it could be divided like this:
On one side the people who see it as the end of time, geographical and body restrictions and celebrate it as the most advanced form of freedom on earth (and beyond!)
And on the other side you will have people seeing it as dissolution of all human interactions, a new kind of oppression really.

But if you dig any deeper, you can’t really oppose virtual VS real. When Aristotle was trying to solve the antinomy of ‘being’, he developed an intermediary stage between ‘non being’ and ‘being’ which is ‘becoming’. (Hope it makes any sense, as they are French translations… I am not 100% happy about them!) For Aristotle, virtual is then more an opposition to ‘acting’.
The notion of becoming active has been further developed by another philosopher: Leibnitz. ‘Becoming active’ happen through something internal such as an internal force. It means that other worlds are possible (or virtual) but in conflict with other ‘possible worlds’. He concludes with this famous quote: ‘we live in the best possible world’.
Kant can explain the last stage. For him, virtual is similar to ‘possible’. However ‘possible’ doesn’t mean what ‘can be’ anymore but what ‘can be thought through’. The issue being that human being are imperfect and limited.

In a philosophical way, virtual points out all the conceivable forms of reality. Nothing new really, however technology has allowed dreams from the past such as sciences fiction to become closer to reality. If virtual isn’t opposed to reality, it actually affects it.
All the problems, questions and antagonisms about virtual are happening at this level. You can define three main interpretations of this phenomenon.

1- Viral represents a transformation of reality and maybe its death.
2- Fragmentation: it’s not about alterity but about confinement and egocentrism.
3- Virtual isn’t a substitution to the real world; it’s a dissolution of the world.

To conclude, there is another way of analysing virtual and virtual worlds. In a contemporary world becoming more and more complex, the potential of virtual could be used as a laboratory for experiments. Virtual worlds could fill the void left by the lack of ‘initiatory rites’ these days. They are offering a reassuring experiment before facing the ‘real world’. There is obviously still a risk: being stuck in a virtual world, however digging a toe in the water in not necessarily a bad thing after all…

Anyway, history works in a circle… Isn’t it true that parent were blaming novels for being an obstacle to reality?

If you want to carry on this conversation have a look on this brilliant Facebook group: Facebook is an Evil Postmodern Construction Relegating Life to a Video Game!