Book ID: CBB802436112

In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (2024)

unapi

Messeri, Lisa Rebecca (Author)


Duke University Press


Publication Date: 2024
Physical Details: 312
Language: English

In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB802436112/

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Authors & Contributors
Hess, David J.
Lappe, Martine D
Lucena, Juan C.
Maggini, Golfo
Mitchell, Robert Cameron
Schneidera, Jen
Journals
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
Social Studies of Science
Science, Technology, and Human Values
The Bridge: Journal of the National Academy of Engineering
Engineering Studies
Research in Philosophy and Technology
Publishers
Aracne
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
John Wiley & Sons
MIT Press
Routledge
Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group
Concepts
Technology and ethics
Technology and society
Social justice
Virtual reality
Ethnography
Internet
People
Dreyfus, Hubert L.
Turkle, Sherry
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
18th century
19th century
Early modern
Places
United States
Great Britain
European Union
Europe
Japan
Sweden
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