The spectrum of virtuality

The Spectrum of Virtuality is available at Bloomsbury. Get a copy here!

The Spectrum of Virtuality: Space, Presence, and the Non-Human in the Internet proposes a way to make sense of internet space and our experience within it. This proposition unfolds over separate but co-productive theories that form a framework offering a means to comprehend our spatial engagement with internet technologies, while still attending to the existence of our bodies. The spectrum of virtuality itself describes how, when we engage with internet space, we take form at some point between corporeal and digital poles of a continuum. Combined with the field of internet presence, it describes how these platform-dependent forms we take afford particular avenues of identity construction and agency and can even foster particular behaviors and ideological constructions. The social space of the internet, co-produced by users in overlapping spaces of affordance, programming, and virtuality explains how our interactions create what it is actually like to Be in internet space. And cybernetic animism addresses how the experience of the internet is influenced by an incursion of non-human elements—bots, algorithms, AI—into the space. This spectrum will be useful to scholars studying digital media in dealing with the thorniness of concurrent presence over multiple platforms, and what it even means to Be in digital space and time. Informed by several years of digital ethnographic fieldwork among the Otherkin community, a group of people who largely socialize online and internally identify as non-human, this exploration troubles conventional notions about our relationships with the virtual, our understandings of the Self, and even what it means to be a human.