The Media Multiverse and Adaptive Virtuality

Abstract

New mediated virtual worlds have created a changed context for ‹interpretive perception›. Each advance in mediated communications alters our perceptual range, our sense of our world, our relation to time and space. We increasingly conflate the real and the virtual, the natural and the artificial. The depth, range and reach of networked digital media, and their virtualised inputs and outputs have been so dispersed into so many facets of everyday life, that this new status constitutes a new media multiverse. The distance of human subjects from the media has so collapsed, as to make it difficult to distinguish media from the whole of life. Media immersion has become a fact of everyday life. The adaptive virtuality of the new networked media creates a powerful amalgam of social immediacy and mediated experiences in everyday situations. But there is little in the way of established critical practices for understanding how the ever present, shifting cultural practices of digital media have altered our perception and how we attempt to communicate.