Etienne:
> the eroticism of virtual reality ...
Good point! And now we shift from the "engineering" explanations to the
"social" and more "theoretical" ones.
Here, I would recommend a careful consideration of Marshall McLuhan.
His 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy summarizes his views of how Western culture
shifted from a *visual* to an *acoustic* sensory bias -- driven by the
shift from a media environment that was largely dominated by printed materials
to those that relied on electricity, including the telegraph, newspaper,
motion picture, radio and television.
This shift brought a new psychological "ground" of sounds -- coming from
everywhere, stimulating concerns over "noise" and even acoustics in
architecture -- and a shift from the *eye* to the *ear*!
This process continues, of course. "Virtual reality" -- which was the
"hot topic" in venture capital circles in the early 1990s, before the Internet
took over for startup funding -- could be thought of as representing the
"next" shift away from analog electrical media towards the next group of
technologies that are *digital*!
As McLuhan (and others) also describe, when the "environment" changes like
this, the previous "ground" (which, as per Gestalt psychology, tends to be
thought of as "in the background") becomes the new "figure" -- to which we
pay a great deal of attention.
Surround sound -- which had been in the "background" in movie theaters --
become something that anyone could have in their living-room (via DVD Dolby
Surround and then 5.1 movie mixes), so you could say that it shifted from
the "ground" to the "figure" in psychological terms.
Now we can "play with" sounds . . . which is of course what electronic
music, home studios and, I suspect, this mailing list are all about.
Yes, this also begs the question of what then become the new "ground" of
our experience!
Mark Stahlman
Brooklyn NY
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