The Body is back: Communication in Cyberspace

We are living in a world that is loosing each day its consistency, a world which appears to play with our senses and our judgments, hiding its real nature. A world in which we can determine "what it looks like", but not "what it is." We know that everything, starting from sensorial stimuli, which transforms into mental models produces the "idea of reality," is of our invention, creation, artifice; what presents itself to our eyes as reality, is constructed owing to the interaction between external stimuli, previous cultural sedimentation, science, technology, and society. Our reality is a generated reality that shares the characteristics of the "artificial".
       
The idea of "truth" comes from the relative stability and the perseverance of the idea itself, in time. The image that is proposed to us corresponds to our expectations. Confronting the stability in our relationship with things, the problem is not in the accusation of the "non-reality" or "non-truth" of the experience, but it is in adapting our criteria to the novelties of the material substratum with which we form a tight relationship, and to develop a culture able to give these novelties a socially recognizable value. It is on the stability of this relationship between the "signifier" and the "signified" that our culture builds its own sense of reality and truth.more...