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Virtual reality is that part of human experience that does not happen in a physical space. Reading a book creates virtual reality, as does participating in an online chat or a telephone conference. These experiences are called "virtual" because the people involved are not actually in the story of the book or in a conference room with other people but physically separated; nonetheless, they participate in the community through thought and imagination and, in some cases, through their eyes, via the monitors, and fingers, via the keyboards.

The term virtual reality came into wide use during the 1990s with the increasing popularity of the Internet, and the concept of virtual reality led to many of the metaphors used to describe Internet interactions. A chat room, for example, is not a room, and it does not even have a physical location; it consists entirely of the people who are "meeting" there and interact. They do not meet, of course, but happen to be at their personal computers at the same moment in time. They also do not chat or talk but write messages that appear on others peoples' screens. Keyed graphics called smileys, such as :-) and ;-}, convey emotional content. Sometimes people wander off into separate "rooms" to be more "intimate" with a few others instead of sharing their thoughts in "public." These and many other metaphors are used for two reasons. First, humans are physical entities, and, from an evolutionary perspective, everything they did in the past happened in physical time and space. Language arising from this background is naturally physical in its description of human interaction. But once these metaphors are used they also become a selling point for virtual reality because they suggest that virtual reality allows for complete personal interactions.

Despite their obvious popularity, chat rooms and other virtual reality entities raise serious questions. One of the most obvious is the fact that among virtual reality communities there are several churches and prayer groups. The question is, can such spiritual virtual reality communities actually replace mortar and brick churches? Cybercommunities lack the physical space that bodies, together in liturgy and practice, create. Gender, race, and age have no defined roles. In virtual reality, people can lie about themselves and construct different identities. In addition, virtual reality communities give people the freedom to project all their wishes and desires about a "real" community onto the cyber-community because there is no way to know who is there and if the people are actually likeable. But is this community? And where does this wish for clean and perfect relationships come from when everyone knows that real-world relationships are flawed, stressful, full of ambiguities, yet so much fun. Because there is no physical commitment or connection in cyberspace, web communities may be ultimately indifferent and meaningless to the people involved.

The understanding of humankind in recent years has changed from a dualistic, cognition-oriented understanding toward an embodied and social one. The intelligence of humans is not the main characteristic of the species—it is much more the human capacity to connect and to survive in any given environment. Virtual reality, however, is a direct result of the assumption that embodiment and shared physical space are not important for community building because the body is not part of what turns a human into an individual. But if cognitive science theories are correct, then virtual reality spaces lack the required physicality, and relationships in them are incomplete.

See also INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

ANNE FOERST