On 31/05/2012 10:03, Dave Malham wrote: ..
Here, to any extent, I depart from Gibson. With sufficiently advanced technology there comes a point at which the effort required to suspend disbelief is so small as to be negligible. I was reading a report on a paper a few months ago (I think in New Scientist) where the authors were suggesting that some on-line gamers have difficult perceiving the "real world" as actually being real when they come out of the games.
But surely that is more appropriately regarded as a pathological/delusional mental state (and very possibly a dangerous one), not a natural one representing some sort of technological nirvana. There is a world of difference between entertaining and even immersing in a fantasy as such (as in attending any Shakespeare play), and a delusion leading to possibly dysfunctional behaviour in "the real world". Shall we call this the "Matrix Syndrome"?
Richard Dobson _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list [email protected] https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
