Relationship Between Virtuality and Reality
Relationship between Virtuality and Reality
Imagine when you go to a grocery store to buy toothpaste. Will you buy the brand which often shows up on TV commercials or the one that you have never heard of but with lower price? I assume that most people, including me, will buy the first kind of toothpaste. Is it really better than the second one? Not really. Economists probably might say that the first one is more expensive is not because it is actually better than the second one but is because it has TV commercial cost. Then why are people still buying the first brand? Is it the magic of advertisements? Sherry Turkles in her article "Virtuality and Its Discontents" , Virginia Colwell in her article “Mail-Order Brides: The Content of Internet Courtship” , and Charles Baxter in his article "Shame and Forgetting in The Information Age" all talked about how virtuality affects our lives. TV creates a virtual world where everything is perfect, and more importantly it is controlled. All the commercials are talking about the good aspects of a product but never the bad ones. People even name some products as the brand name, like Kleenex for tissues. People then use that virtuality when they go buy things at stores because they think the products will make the reality perfect like the virtual world, but they never do, since virtuality is created reality, and should not be confused with life. They can complement each other, but they are different in many ways.
At the beginning of her article, Turkles describes a scene of people having coffee in an internet café. Why do people prefer sitting in front of a computer "talking" to someone they have never met rather than going to a real café, sitting and talking with real friends? She later makes a valid point saying that women are actually building a world when they read novel, which suggests that a virtual world is helping people create a dream which can never or hardly come true in real life: "Romance reading becomes a form
Imagine when you go to a grocery store to buy toothpaste. Will you buy the brand which often shows up on TV commercials or the one that you have never heard of but with lower price? I assume that most people, including me, will buy the first kind of toothpaste. Is it really better than the second one? Not really. Economists probably might say that the first one is more expensive is not because it is actually better than the second one but is because it has TV commercial cost. Then why are people still buying the first brand? Is it the magic of advertisements? Sherry Turkles in her article "Virtuality and Its Discontents" , Virginia Colwell in her article “Mail-Order Brides: The Content of Internet Courtship” , and Charles Baxter in his article "Shame and Forgetting in The Information Age" all talked about how virtuality affects our lives. TV creates a virtual world where everything is perfect, and more importantly it is controlled. All the commercials are talking about the good aspects of a product but never the bad ones. People even name some products as the brand name, like Kleenex for tissues. People then use that virtuality when they go buy things at stores because they think the products will make the reality perfect like the virtual world, but they never do, since virtuality is created reality, and should not be confused with life. They can complement each other, but they are different in many ways.
At the beginning of her article, Turkles describes a scene of people having coffee in an internet café. Why do people prefer sitting in front of a computer "talking" to someone they have never met rather than going to a real café, sitting and talking with real friends? She later makes a valid point saying that women are actually building a world when they read novel, which suggests that a virtual world is helping people create a dream which can never or hardly come true in real life: "Romance reading becomes a form