New technologies have blurred the boundaries-protections of POP’s, People, Objects and Places. When in second life, avatars, still post-human behind their disguise… as computers have become people’s prosthetics, do mix the real to the virtual: avatars, even if half animal are made of known referents (they are not fantastic extra-terrestrial creatures; centaurs are still half human and half horse!) , and the way they articulate their territory, a kind of neo-suburbia, is not so much different than in first life.

Hence the virtual is so real.

We may also wonder if the real isn’t virtual… Indeed, for Jean Beaudrillard, the real is no longer real; we live in a world of simulations. Read: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation (Paris : Editions Galilée, 1981).

I came to think again about the boundaries between real and virtual because in the Digital + Mobilities seminar I currently teach, a student brought the Wii example to the table for discussion… A sort of remote control that makes you lose control or loosen up…

Surely the boundaries between real and virtual do blur, as the tool enables the physical interaction with the virtual world. With that tool though, it is as if we were in that other world : we feel that space on the other side of the screen. So is that virtual other space, so real, that it feels us…