Leisure Studies 19 (2000) 211–225
Virtually nothing: re-evaluating the signi cance of cyberspace ANDY MIAH School of Physical Education, Sport and Leisure, De Montfort University Bedford, 37 Lansdowne Road, Bedford, England, MK40 2BZ UK. E-mail: amiah@dmu.ac.uk
This paper provides a critical analysis of virtual environments made in recent leisure and cultural studies discussions, which claim virtual reality to be the technotopia of post-modern society. Such positions describe virtual realities as worlds of in nite freedom, which transcend human subjectivity and where identity becomes no longer burdened by the prejudices of persons. Arguing that cyberspace offers little more than a token gesture towards such liberation, the paper suggests a shift in focus from the power relations that might change or remain because of virtual environments, to an awareness of their implications for human beings. Such technologies as chat rooms, the Internet and cyber-sex, are used to illustrate the fundamental challenge of virtual leisure to the human condition. This human condition is often presumed to represent ‘reality/actuality’ and, as such, is said to be in contrast to virtual environments. However, this paper extends its critique of virtual reality, by questioning such a distinction and arguing that new cyber-virtual reality is no more or no less than a sophistication of virtualness that has always re ected the human, embodied experience. Consequently, it is argued how cyberspace is more profound for its challenge to identity construction than for its emancipatory function.
Introducing cyberspace The emergence of computer technology has been the subject of an overwhelming discourse for the last decade. The new cyberspatial environments have been argued as furthering society towards postmodernity and the realisation of a plural self (Rojek, 1995). Within this context, it has been written how cyberspace brings a state of mind to the individual that is beyond traditional leisure experiences and the language of homogeneity. It is a way to escape from the values and constraints of one’s immediate culture, the commodi cation and devaluation of conventional leisure (Rojek, 1993). Computer culture presents itself as being the mode of freedom within which one can go anywhere and do anything, albeit in a very narrow sense (one must be tied to a computer or avatar). For these reasons, leisure requires radical reinterpretation for having become disassociated from its conventional constituents. Indeed, it remains unclear whether cyberspatial leisure can, in fact, be conceptualized as leisure at all. This new world, brave or otherwise, permits the browser to embark upon a new adventure, to initiate a new twist to the narrative, and a means to encounter the de-contextualized ‘other’ (with whom, supposedly, there are no means to comprehend it). As Leisure Studies ISSN 0261-4367 print/ISSN 1466-4496 online © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals