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Файл:The Information Resonance in Social System. Monograph
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Chapter 6. Constitution of virtual actions
in the structure of social system
Problem of “virtual reality” in sociology
irtualization is rather a new subject of the sociological
V
analysis, though some approaches and preliminary
conclusions have already been outlined, but ontological and
gnosiological aspects of this phenomenon are not discussed.
The phenomenological approach dominates. So, V.M. Rozin
writes that virtualization is mainly considered only as a process
of replacement of real things by the imagined ones [1], though
virtualization is not simply a process of replacement, but a
process of likening images, symbols to real things.
Z. Baudrillard marked that virtualization is mainly considered
as a process of simulation, a process of creating the simulacra
[2], however, he doesn’t discover the way the virtual exists in
the social. At the same time, M. Castells, V.I. Tishchenko and
F. Hayek specify that numerous virtual communities have
appeared [3, 4, 5]. The virtual communities are treated as an
element of the information society. They exist in the social
reality itself, but not outside of it. The virtual communities are
the special communicative space, the specific form of
interaction which is carried out by means of Internet, the global
computer network. The virtual communities are created for
solving any social problems. The virtual community as “an
expanded form” [6] of public relations differs from its
predecessors (market and industrial forms) by the fact that the
direct information interactions between people dominate in its
environment. In M.Castells’ opinion, the versions of virtual
communities are network organizations.
PART II. SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS 102
Some researchers believe that new special sectors of social
space – «cyberspace» and a special social reality – “virtual
reality” have been formed. Their opinion made A. Buhl,
A. Kroker, M. Veinstein, M.Paetau [7, 8, 9], as well as the
Russian sociologist D.V. Ivanov turn to the study of new social
communities, new norms and values, cultures and social
institutes. The processes of virtualization can be found in
different spheres of the society: politics, economy, science, and
art. In the economic sphere virtualize good, innovations,
production, market, entrepreneurship, corporation, money.
So, D.V. Ivanov considers that the modernity in general
submits to the imperative of virtualization. In his research
works, he has mentioned numerous facts confirming, in his
opinion, the existence of virtualization as totality [10]. In fact,
in the present period, in the epoch of postmodern, the sign first
acts as an item of goods. The cost of goods is defined by the
social status of a manufacturer, not by the cost of goods
manufactured as it was earlier during the epoch of the modernist
style. They start to produce with the help of advertising not the
thing itself, but its image. The formation of the cost moves from
the branches producing the goods to the branches creating
images, i.e.to the service industry.
In the studies carried out by A. Buhl, A. Kroker,
M. Veinstein and D.V. Ivanov, it was impossible to fix a new
social object as a whole, and also as becoming integrity, i.e. as a
special type of a social organism. Everybody, except for
M. Paetau, considers virtualization as a process of creating the
virtual society with its own laws, and this society is parallel to
the social world. This point of view is caused by the fact that
the above-mentioned researchers initially understand the system
of institutes as a society. Therefore, they consider the virtual
reality arising as a result of the processes of virtualization to be
an alienation from the pressure of social institutes. So,
M. Paetau bases on the understanding of a society which is
offered by N. Luhman: the society is a system of
communications [11]. Hence, in the opinion by B. Becker and
M. Paetau, the modern society is a system of virtual
CHAPTER 6. CONSTITUTION OF VIRTUAL ACTIONS 103
communications [12]. A new form of communications –
electronic with the new virtual contents appears in the epoch of
postmodernism. The virtual communications penetrate all
spheres of a society. The virtual communications are the
operations of translating images and symbols. Thus, social
institutes (the market, the state, political parties, a corporation, a
university) do not cease to be a social reality, but they
become/its new form – a virtual one. The institutional structure
of society is simulated, but not eliminated, as keeping the
attributes of the reality it serves as a kind of virtual operational
environment in which the images are convenient to create and
broadcast and which is open to input/output. Have virtualized
the society does not disappear, but it is redefined, its social
order changes. The computer technologies and, in the first
place, the technologies of a virtual reality appeared to be the
most effective toolkit of simulating a society. Now the
imperative of simulation leads to the transformation of
computer technologies into the infrastructure of any human
action [13].
Author’s concept
In my opinion, the interpretation of the social virtualization
phenomena could become the most productive from the position
of the search for the new social order considered as the unity of
certain and uncertain processes and tendencies in the formation
of new social norms, communities and institutes.
The innovations leading to the occurrence of the new social
order relate to steady elements. Virtualization processes can be
related to innovative processes, and virtualization is to be
interpreted as a way of the occurrence of the new order of a
qualitatively new social system.
The social order is the certain sequence of interrelations that
expresses the orientation and the contents of people interactions
and being the basis of their joint ability to live. Interactions
represent, according to P.Sorokin, interactions between actors
PART II. SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS 104
by means of the intermediary (actor - medium-actor) [14]. The
form of the social order differs depending on the type of the
intermediary. Letters and the phone having been an
intermediary before, now already a computer acts in this way.
And the computer is not simply a machine for reproducing
computer operations what it was at the initial stage of the
occurrence, the computer means a virtual dialogue. It is
necessary to note that virtual communications were always
inherent in the society; however they did not allow such ample
opportunities for a dialogue as virtual communications of the
new type based on the network Internet. They connect people
who are taking place at the very big distance from each other,
order interactions between people, compressing space and time.
Thus, the virtual communications based on the network
Internet, have affected a change of the form and the contents of
social interactions due to the expansion of the social
interactions. This phenomenon is meant by M. Castells, when
describing the formation of the network society that is based on
virtual communications and carried out by means of the
network [15].
The social order is conditions of the existence at which the
various samples of the social organization submitted by the set
of institutes and ways of their influence on a social life are
formed and supported. In social institutes of the information
society there actively appear virtual phenomena which do not
liquidate the old ones but introduce some new contents.
The system of the symbolical social world is generated by
the new social system, a system of the new way of the social
order organization. For its theoretical display it is necessary to
fix the elementary cell of the structure. In my opinion, it
performs virtual social interactions (a system of the social
action), i.e. the illusion of the subject influence on the subject.
How does this special system of social action appear?
CHAPTER 6. CONSTITUTION OF VIRTUAL ACTIONS 105
The system of virtual social action
This steady and increasing in the whole society
information surplus generates, in A.Giddens and S.Lash's
opinion, disorder, i.e. a model overabundance of the role
behavior choice [16, 17]. But disorder grows in conditions of
the control over resources by other significant actors.
Therefore, orientation to another as a condition of the purpose
achievement is the basis of both interactions and actions. The
information organized as a resource, i.e. ready to execute a
function of individual means of purpose achievement, allows
the actor to be oriented not by another, but by their own
created normative order. Z. Bauman names this phenomenon
as an individualized society; S.Lash fixes the norms
replacement with individual values.
In this connection the Z. Bauman’s theory of "an
individualized society” (as his modernity theory) can be
interpreted as the theory of permanent and increasing disorder,
that is the essence of this society, and the given process can be
interpreted as provoked by the increasing growth of the
information streams that fall on the separate actor. Thus, it is
possible to name it an “information resonance”.
In the same key it is possible to interpret the S.Lash’ theory
of increasing social uncertainty, which he defined as the norms
replacement with individual values (as the basis of the
interactive regulation), and the replacement of the society
(Gesellschaft) with the social world of growing communities
(Gemeinschaft), and the concept of "growth of risks” of
A. Giddens.
The following model is relevant to this theoretical construct.
The actor practice under conditions of “the information
resonance” is caused not socially but individually as the
orientation to their own norms. Thus, a resource – the
information – remains a socially generated factor of purpose
achievements and orientations in the social space. Therefore,
the action of the actor remains social. But there arises
something new – informative – social, in the sense, that there is
PART II. SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS 106
a new substratum of social connections. The social control and
formation of social communities are displaced in the space of
the virtual, imagined, secondary and "parallel" social world. But
information resources and conditions of manufacture of the
information continue to be defined in the sphere of the real
social practice. Therefore, the social reality is doubled – it
becomes simultaneously both practical, and virtual. The
contrast and discrepancy of the changed social interaction will
be expressed in it. Virtuality changes not only the information
(its purposes and the contents), but also practical activities, as
the resources having a natural and social character.
In case the action is mainly determined as virtual, the social
action proceeds under the influence of mutually conditioned
practical and virtual action. One of the consequences of this
“information resonance”, in our opinion, is a destruction of
"habitus" as a universal mechanism of the interiorization (the
way the actor inherits, transfers, perceives and uses their social
experience).
The original "conceptual" resonance of this phenomenon
became a reason for a number of fundamental conclusions of
the theory “a way of informational development” by M.Castells.
The communication system “ It is a system in which reality
itself (that is, people’s material/symbolic existens) is entirely
captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world
of make believe, in which appearances are not just on the screen
through which experience is communicated, but they become
the experience” [18].
M. Castells characterizes the connection between the
information and virtualization as follows: “the media,
particularly radio and television, have the become the
audiovisual environment with which we interact endlessly and
automatically” [19]. “They are the symbolic fabric of our life,
the media tend to work on consciousness and behavior as real
experience works on dreams, providing the raw material out of
which our brain works. It is as if the world of visual dreams
(the information/entertainment provided by television) would
give back to our consciousness the power to select, recombine,
CHAPTER 6. CONSTITUTION OF VIRTUAL ACTIONS 107
and interpret the images and sounds that we have generated
through our collective practices or by our individual
preferences” [20].
However, traditional mass-media have not transformed the
unidirectional logic of their announcement and have not
allowed establishing an original feedback. It is the world of the
unidirectional communications. It is possible to assert that the
image of the social cvasy parallel world in this case is formed,
but it is parallel to real. There is an imitation and collision of the
displayed images with real samples of interaction. But thus, the
image present “social whole”, represented by mass-media, is
kept.
The concept of "informationalizm" of M. Castells allows
specifying a new character of the interrelation between the
information and knowledge during the information "epoch"
generating an information civilization.
Let us take one of its initial postulates: there is not simply
an accumulation of knowledge, and perfection and accumulation of technologies of knowledge accumulation.
As the information is knowledge which is organized for
transfer, and the technolized and tecnolizing knowledge is
potentially focused and prepared for including in practice, the
technolized economy is not the economy of the subjects and
activity exchange and the economy of a symbolical simulation,
when subjects, energy and activity are replaced by symbols (the
symbolical world, "simulacra"), exchanges and consumes not
properties of subjects, and all new and new fragments
information of subjects “information on the information”. The
information becomes a substance of the society, instead of cost
(as in the industrial civilization based on the capitalist economic
system), and a substratum – the symbolical world as not the
subject (as opposed to a subject substratum of "commodity
world of things” industrial civilization). Specificity, qualitative
difference of the new form of social interaction is obviously
fixed. Not casually for a number of researchers search and find
phenomena, with success designated by them the new term
"virtuality". But the designation is not a definition yet. In all
PART II. SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS 108
resulted (including M.Castells) definitions or descriptions of
virtual phenomena there is one lack: researchers get in a logic
trap, defining the virtuality through "symbolical", and
symbolical through “virtual” that clears up neither the nature
nor the specificity of virtuality. There is also a semantic trap: in
the search of specific attributes for virtuality it was not possible
to go further than banal ascertaining, that a virtual action and a
reality is a symbolical action and a reality. But, in fact, the
social interaction has always a symbolical (sign-symbolical)
intermediary.
In a virtual reality the person allocates with senses,
knowledge those subjects and phenomena of the social world
which cannot be explained. Thus, virtualization of people’s
social life is carried out, on the one hand, by means of
symbolical replacement of unknown sides of the real world,
and, on the other hand, be means of reproduction and selfreproduction of senses. Thus, the virtual can be related to the
sphere of the ideal.
As "virtual" as well as "ideal” influence the real, the virtual
reality, having generated all over again in collective
consciousness, is embodied then in the real, becoming a
powerful lever of supervising and regulating the influence on
the course of people real ability to live. The virtual reality is
shown in the real by means of symbols (rituals, sign systems
and so forth) and its special another life.
The virtual and the real are interconnected and will
mutually penetrate each other. Virtuality "comprehends" the
world, and the real keeps it or changes. The virtual comprises
new values, samples of behavior, and exists initially irrespective
of the real, lives under its own laws. Social progress, occurrence
of the new social order passes through the world possible
(virtual). However, the progress will not come until this world
is staticized by innovative intelligence, action i.e., until values,
samples of behavior are not included in real life, and order
social interactions.
In that case, the virtuality in a society can be considered as
an ability of a separate person to creativity. The superiority of
CHAPTER 6. CONSTITUTION OF VIRTUAL ACTIONS 109
an individual creativity above a group one is the approach of
virtual social reality.
The phenomenon of virtuality is rooted in non- reducibility
of the realities.
For the person that part of the social world is real, which
includes his person, from which he cooperates not in
imagination (potentially), and is actual, i.e. testing influence of
the concrete people, directed on him, and itself influences
concrete people. The other social world as a whole is given to
him not actually, but virtually, i.e., it is in his consciousness, but
not included in concrete actions. The imagined events are
potential and possible, but not actual – they are not actions.
The first aspect of the application of the concept "virtuality"
to studying the social phenomena: virtuality is a phenomenon
which exists only while there is an interaction between social
subjects. If there is no interaction, it breaks up. But, if the
virtuality is the ideal in a social reality, the virtual contradicts
the essence of the ideal: the ideal does not disappear after the
interaction terminates, it continues to live not as an action of
subjects, but as thoughts and ideas of subjects. When virtuality
disappears, the norms of interaction break up. And only this
phenomenon gives the basis for the use of a special concept – a
virtual social reality.
The second aspect: virtuality are such samples of the action
and interaction which are either taken by separate individuals
freely from the arsenal of "irrelevant" samples, or at the very
beginning designed at the level of imagination, instead of
interaction, and then, at their will, are entered in the interaction.
These are the samples of the interaction in which one subject is
real, and another is imagined.
Thus, the actual social interaction is an interaction with the
participation of real, not the imagined actors. The virtual social
interaction takes place when one of the sides is the real subject,
and another is “the image of another”. As the basis of the social
system of this type is the symbolical exchange as the form of
the symbolical social interaction; the specific system of the
social action – “virtual social action” is formed.
PART II. SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS 110
It is possible to assume, that the virtualization as a social
phenomenon results in the transformation of the base "cell" of
the initial elementary system of society – social interaction. The
system of actual and virtual social action emerges.
The person in virtual reality
The virtual social reality is the society of the performance in
which the individual acquires many “faces”, and the washing
out of his identities and roles is observed. Theatricalization of
life, in Gi Debor’s opinion, is shown in the increased
consumption of symbols, their perception, and the interactive
exchange of symbols. In the development of the interactive
information space and the creation of more and more refined
technologies for manipulating the public consciousness, the
performance merges with life in which the distinction between
the imaginary and the original, the dramatized and the real, the
public and the intimate becomes more and more challenging.
The public is dissolved in the total theatricalization of the social
on the way to a “hidden society”. The “performances” definitely
become more and more real, close to life, and are included into
it [21].
According to the concept of postmodernism the hyperreality
represented in images, symbols is the environment of modern
person. The hyperreality is distributed, deforms senses,
transforms the original life into representation, the human life
into the theatre. In the society of advanced technologies,
especially electronic mass-media, the possibility of multiple
perception appears and undermines the person’s belief in the
objective reality. In the world of mass media the difference
between the reality and the imagination has collapsed, and its
place has been occupied by hyperreality and the
interdependence of signs. We can see, in Z.Baudrillard's
opinion, the model of the future form of controllable
socialization: the congestion of all isolated functions of a social
body and life in one homogeneous space-time, the space-time of
the whole operational simulation of a social life [22].
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