The Virtual Reality of the Web Landscape

“The spatiality of the Internet [World Wide Web] is an abstraction and therefore not tied to the physical world.” Upon some reflection, Akin Akinly, one of my students, added that the Web is “holographic, a spatial representation of the human neural network, replicated in the topography of cyberspace.” For most of us, the Net is a virtual [artificial or simulated, performing the function of something that really isn’t there] space, a web or universe, even a womb, that contains millions of addresses and links, and has the possibility of expanding into every conceivable direction. These few descriptors already indicate that we use the language of our human past to describe this unique spatiality. Thus we “get on” (the train of) the Web and we “surf” (its ocean of sites). However real the Web may be in its virtuality, we can barely begin to imagine this unusual new world and so we assign it characteristics that brings it closer to our understanding. This being/entity, too, will never be more to us than our limited mental scope permits.