Virtual Automobility: Two Ways to Get a Life

Pixels as automobility

In this chapter, I try to think out the difference between two forms of imaginary automobility, one associated with the now fading age of the book, the other associated with the new electronic age. Reading a novel and surfing the net are two forms of automobility or of what several of the chapters in this book call ‘motility’ (Latimer and Munro, this volume). I sit in my chair reading a book or facing a computer screen and travel by my own autonomous effort. In both cases I move outside myself into virtual realities that may make me sometimes forget entirely where I ‘really am’. What is the difference between these two forms of automobility? In thinking about this I have been immensely aided by the other chapters in this volume. They have taught me much about the history and sociology of actual automobile use. They have also taught me much about the socio-economic and political conditions presiding over the current shift from a print and manufactured-commodities culture to an information culture. This shift is turning even automobiles more and more into moving media and information centres, and ultimately toward being ‘smart cars’, quasi-robots guided by ‘smart roads’. The driver will then become a passenger like any other. All on board will be able to continue working on the computer, sending emails, listening to iPods, or playing computer games, just as they would at home or in the office. This would ‘happily’ combine actual automobility, movement through space, with virtual automobility or motility by way of computer chips. I agree, as Nicole Shukin argues in this volume, that the shift from books to computers is not ‘progress’. It is a lateral movement from one technology to another within a hegemonic capitalism that is recklessly destroying the planet. Ross (1999) talks about a striking statistical study showing it takes almost as many tons of energy (15 to 19) to fabricate a PC as to fabricate a car (25 tons). So much for the idea that the pixilated culture will be disembodied or free from the need to exploit natural resources! I have elsewhere investigated at some length the question of ‘the death of literature’ (Miller, 2002, esp. 1–23). The book epoch is slowly fading, as various digitized media gradually replace books in the daily lives of most people. Books, however, will be around for a long time yet. In addition, ‘literature’, not in the sense of printed novels, poems, and plays, but in the sense of the ‘literary’, that is, tropological and fictive-performative uses of language and other signs, is migrating to those other media: radio, film, television, popular music, computer games, advertising, and television news. The ‘literary’ will never die, but it is transmigrating.

My focus is on the effects of two capitalist technologies on the subjective life of the ‘consumer’, in this case the book reader as against the player of computer games. Most people agree that telecommunication technologies are transforming capitalism and therefore the life of those who live under capitalism. Telematics are making capitalism more radically transnational, much more difficult to control by a given nation's laws and powers. Just-in-time or kanban methods of design and production can combine parts and know-how from all over the world to put together a finished product, whether it is an automobile or that powerful instrument of motility, a personal computer, or, for that matter, a printed book or magazine.

One of the abbreviations used in emails and chatrooms, so I am told, is ‘gal’: ‘Get a life!’ It is a wonderfully subtle and nuanced exhortation or putdown. It suggests, not too gently, that the person to whom it is addressed does not have a life at this point. He or she has manifested that by some behaviour or speech obnoxious to the exasperated interlocutor. The latter says, ‘Get a life!’

Why doesn't that person have a life already? Presumably because he or she is too hung up on conventional judgments, values, and behaviour. To ‘get a life’ means, I take it, to abandon prescribed values and behaviours, to live freely, according to self-generated norms that defy convention. To have a life is to have integrity, independence, and originality. The myth of free automobility associated with motor-cars is a version of that ideal. Of course the performative command, ‘Get a life!’ is often an invitation not to independence but to joining the speaker's way of life, just as using an automobile, as many of the chapters in this volume show, is a form of subservience, not of unlimited freedom. ‘Get a life!’ then means, ‘Give up your present life and join me and my way of life’. It is a quasi-religious injunction. Jesus promised that if you joined him you would get a life, and get it more abundantly. ‘For whosoever hath’, said Jesus in the parable of the sower, ‘to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand’ (Matt. 13: 12–13). Like the parables of Jesus, ‘gal’ is addressed to those that have ears and can hear or eyes that can see and understand. The code is inscrutable to those not in the know. The injunction ‘gal!’ it happens, is a set of letters with an ironic meaning of its own. ‘Gal’ is somewhat derogatory slang for ‘girl’. To understand the cryptic, ‘gal!’ or to crack its code is already to belong to a somewhat esoteric community, a community apart, perhaps a community of dissensus.

My questions are the following: Is the sense of what it means to have a life, a genuine identity or selfhood, changing with the ongoing shift from a paper-based culture to a pixel-based or pixilated culture? If so, just how? Are new forms of community developing that define in new ways what it means to have a life? Are they perhaps communities of true dissensus, that is, unique, self-enclosed, incommensurate groups, with singular goals and norms? Is the way we live now, or want to live, different from the way we used to live? If one wanted to get a life today would one do it differently? These questions have often been asked. Many answers have been proposed in recent years. I still find it not all that easy to get clarity that satisfies me. This essay is another try.

A large literature on these topics already exists, including some things I have written myself (Bukatman, 1993; Dery, 1996; Turkle, 1997; Negroponte, 1999; Miller, 1999; Derrida and Stiegler, 2002; Derrida, 2005; Miller, 2002a; Miller, 2002b; Dery, in this volume). David Crystal's fascinating Language and the Internet has an eight page closely-packed bibliography, even though it limits itself to the question named in its title (Crystal, 2001). ‘It is not the aim of this book,’ says Crystal firmly, ‘to reflect on the consequences for individuals and for society of lives that are lived largely in cyberspace’ (2001: 3). This is just what I want to reflect on. Crystal does not really, strictly speaking, obey his prohibition, with anything like crystal clarity. The consequences for individuals and for society cannot be separated from the effect of the Internet, as Crystal puts it, ‘on language in general, and on individual languages in particular’ (2001: 3). Crystal's bibliography includes such items as Diane F. Witmer's and Sandra Lee Katzman's ‘On-line smiles: does gender make a difference in the use of graphic accents?’ (Witmer and Katzman, 1997).

Horace reading

Let me propose a thought experiment. I want to juxtapose the ‘lives’ of two teenagers, one at about 1946, the other today. Both, it happens, are, in my imagination of them, male. Whether that makes a decisive difference is a large and complex question, on which I shall only briefly touch. I think it does make a difference. Our culture interpellates males and females, boys and girls, to behave differently in their ways of submission to reigning communication technologies, whether of paper or of pixel. I doubt if the difference is primarily biological. Witmer and Katzman (1997), however, found relatively little difference between the way men and women use online smiles, so one must be wary of jumping to conclusions about this.

I call the first of my virtual personages, ‘Horace’, in memory of Horace Greeley (1811–72), an earlier American paper man. I call the other ‘Jim’, or ‘Jimjim’ to his family and friends, for no particular reason. I had thought of calling Jimjim Jimjane, to express the uncertainty of his or her gender, as he or she is called to express it by the Internet. The evidence I have, however, suggests that the particular cyberpersonality I have in mind is more likely to be male. Though the avatars people adopt in cyberspace may often be deliberately uncertain or ambiguous as to the gender of the user, Jimjim says, speaking of the computer game he habitually plays: ‘From SubSpace specifically, I only know about four female players well. I know of a few more, something like 10 or 20

[out of eighty or more], but I don't know them well. There aren't very many girls that play SubSpace, and I'm sure some of them don't like to tell people they are, since it sometimes leads to bad situations’ (personal communication to author). Jimjim's sister and female cousin, also teenagers, are also computer-adept, but they use cyberspace in quite different ways from Jimjim. His sister also studies computer science, but she is interested in programming for neuroscience research. She uses AOL Instant Messenger primarily to talk online with friends she has known since high school. Jimjim's cousin works for a small company that creates websites for local businesses. She is a gifted computer artist, whereas graphic design does not interest Jimjim much. The cousin and a friend, also female, created an online newspaper with a distinctly radical political bias. I conclude that different teenagers live in cyberspace in quite different ways. It would be an error to try to generalize a single cyberpersonality. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to invent a plausible imaginary cyberperson who combines all these uses of the Internet, while being in addition gender-blind. Each cyberperson is to some degree singular, sui generis.

The first of my imaginary teenagers is alone around 1946 sitting in an easy chair reading a book. He is reading Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights for the first time. Ever since Horace taught himself to read at age five, so he would not have to depend on his mother to read Alice in Wonderland to him, he has spent as much time as people will allow him to do reading books. He also makes model airplanes and ‘ham’ radios. He is pretty much a loner. Decisive moments in his life are often encounters with books. An example was his first reading of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, when he was a sophomore in college. ‘Ah Ha!’, he said to himself, ‘At last I have found someone like myself. This man speaks for me. “I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased”. Wonderful! A soulmate at last’.

This imaginary personage was a perfect example of what Simon During calls ‘literary subjectivity’ (During, 2000). Not only did Horace ‘love literature’ and spend a lot of time reading it. His sense of himself, of who and what he was, was also to a large degree, though of course not completely, determined by the literary works he read. He was called to be what he was by literature. He was a child of the print epoch, or rather of what Jacques Derrida calls the paper age. No television then. No computers. No World Wide Web. Radio, yes. This young person listened to ‘Amos and Andy’, ‘Easy Aces’, and ‘The Lone Ranger’. Horace remembers hearing hectoring speeches by Hitler broadcast for an American audience in incomprehensible – but very impressive – German. The house had a telephone, but this virtual person does not remember using it much, certainly not for long distance calls, which were a big event in the house, when they happened.

Horace was surrounded by various forms of paper. These were piled up around him, not only the paper of all those books, but the paper of his birth certificate and the rest of his ‘identity papers’, the paper on which he wrote his student ‘papers’ and examinations, at first in longhand, then, the papers that is, on the typewriter. In addition, there was the paper on which he wrote rather infrequent letters, infrequent, that is, until he fell in love and wrote reams of love letters when separated from his beloved, paper on which he kept a mawkish diary, all those papers on which he signed his name or inscribed his initials, for example in that diary or on the fly-leaves of the books he owned, and so on.

Horace was a paper man, a bookworm. Paper was inseparable from his identity. Paper was a prosthetic extension of himself, or rather it was a kind of self outside himself. Paper, or what was written on it, called, exhorted, demanded, or beseeched, with an irresistible force, that he be what he was. If he had commanded such eloquence, not to speak of having had command over the French language, he might have said what Jacques Derrida says in ‘Paper or Me, You Know… (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor)’, an interview of 1997: “‘I who can sign or recognize my name on a surface or a paper support”; “The paper is mine”; “Paper is a self or ego”; “Paper is me“’ (Derrida, 2005: 56). For such a person, unless an agreement or commitment is ‘put on paper’, it is not binding. It is not for real. Reading works of fiction, in any case, was Horace's chief form of virtual automobility.

Jimjim at the computer

What a difference when we turn to Jimjim, the second virtual person in my thought experiment! Let us imagine him today. He is seated at his computer, at three o'clock in the morning. He is doing five things at once. He is playing a collective computer game called SubSpace with a group from various countries. He is listening to MP3 songs. He is using AOL Instant Messenger to carry on an email conversation with a friend. He is at the same time engaged in a multi-person interchange with a chatgroup through IRC (Internet Relay Chat). He is also doing homework for his university classes.

Jimjim is a computer science student at a public university. He has been using computers since he was five or six. By a year or two later he was making changes in his mother's computer (the only one to which he had access). Strange things happened when she turned it on, a message on the screen or a new screen saver. He was an early player of computer games. He would play for eight or ten hours at a time, stopping only for meals, when forced to do so. He showed early on an interest in changing or reprogramming game programmes. He has never read a programme manual in his life and is scornful of those who do. The abbreviation ‘rtfm’ (‘read the fucking manual’), one of the items in David Crystal's list of Netspeak codes, would have elicited from Jim a scornful snort or a smiley with a lifted eyebrow or wink:;-), or perhaps the sarcastic smiley: :-]. Jimjim long ago gradually began to use email and chatmail to communicate with friends. He then began to play online games with them, thereby tying up the telephone line in his home for hours at a time. Allowed to do so, he sleeps all day (literally) and stays up all night (literally), using the computer. He eats primarily junk food, when he can get away with it. In short, he is a computer geek. He is even a hacker, in the benign sense of someone who likes to hack or alter programmes, to get down as far into the kernel of the programme as he can and do things to it. He already took a basic programming course in high school. Now, in college, he has his own computer, a PC. He keeps it on all the time. He uses it about four fifths of the time he is in his college room, that is, at least eight hours a day. He has downloaded roughly 1700 MP3 songs and listens to them all the time when he is using the computer. A high point for him was receiving the Mandrake version of Linux as a birthday present. The attraction of Linux for him is its power and openness to being programmed, also the way using it gives Jimjim entry into an elite group of fellow geeks. He passionately believes in open source and in total freedom on the Net. This spills over into his general political views, such as they are. He is, I suppose you would say, a libertarian. He has risen up through the ranks of the online game called SubSpace (played by three quarters of a million people worldwide). He is now a SuperModerator (SMod) in SubSpace. His ‘job’ includes ‘enforcing the rules, watching for cheaters, being nice to the players, hosting events, things like that’ (personal communication). SubSpace is by now, as Jimjim admits, a relatively archaic computer game, somewhat primitive in its graphics. Newer games have a great diversity of subject matter, truly amazing complexity, superb animation, and wonderful sound effects and music. Not all are, like SubSpace, shoot-'em-up games of violence, but a considerable number still are. In SubSpace the weapons are spaceships. ¹

Jimjim has a wide range of friends, mostly casual ones, he has met online, chiefly through SubSpace. Most are from the United States, but a few are from Germany, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and some other countries. A few of these relations are relatively close ones, for example with a girl he met online and has met in person only once. He also uses, as I have mentioned, several chatprogrammes (IRC [Internet Relay Chat], AIM [AOL Instant Messenger], and ICQ, the latter two one person at a time, the former a multiparty chatgroup). The client he uses for IRC is mIRC, a British operation (www.mirc.co.uk). He has never got much into MUDs or MOOs, though some of his friends have. He chats partly with family and friends from high school, but also with the much wider circle of people he has met online.

If Horace got a life from books, Jimjim, it seems clear, gets his life, or much of it, from his active participation in Cyberspace. This is his extravagant form of virtual automobility. Three features of this participation seem especially salient:

Jimjim, when he is online, is usually doing several things at once: listening to MP3s, engaging in several different chat conversations, playing or watching some game, doing homework, etc. ‘When I'm using the computer’, he says, ‘I'm probably going to be talking to someone using AIM, as well as using IRC and playing/watching some game (Most likely SubSpace). I also spend time programming, doing homework, and watching anime, although not as much. I tend to be doing more than one of the above things at the same time, as well’ (personal communication). This reminds me of a citation in David Crystal's Language and the Internet from someone who said: ‘it is possible to do calculus homework and have tinysex [Whatever that is; it is something you do on a TinyMUD; I'm not sure I want to know (JHM).] at the same time, if you type fast enough’ (Crystal, 2001: 187).

Conclusions: what's the difference?

What, if anything, can I conclude from this thought experiment?

First conclusion: There is no use whatever either in handwringing or in triumphalism. These are two extreme judgments of getting a life in cyberspace that we have all probably encountered. On the one hand, the change from paperpersons to cyberpersons has already occurred or is irreversibly under way. Nostalgia will butter no parsnips. On the other hand, the triumphalism, that sees the electronic revolution as justifying a whole-scale bookburning and as ushering in a millennium of peace and transnational plenty, is equally, and symmetrically, wrong. It ain't the end of the world, but it ain't the happy end of history either. The challenge is to take stock of what is happening and to recognize the new possibilities and the new responsibilities that living in cyberspace brings. It would certainly be a disaster, for reasons I shall specify, to try to reform Jimjim, to enforce on him a ‘literary subjectivity’, or to close down his chatgroups and his online computer games, or to police and censor the Internet generally, as is the case, so I am told, in the People's Republic of China. Some real danger of that may exist these days in the United States, as civil liberties come under widespread unconstitutional threat.

Second conclusion: The paper age is by no means over. It will probably last a long time to come, just as manuscript culture lasted into the print age. On the one hand, Jimjim reads or used to read a lot of literature, chiefly science fiction. He mentions Neal Stephenson, Roger Zelazny, Larry Niven, among others. And of course Jimjim has his identity papers too, though more and more these are being replaced by cards that have an electronic component. Horace, on the other hand, has grown up to become, you guessed it, a university professor. He now writes on the computer, after beginning with longhand, shifting to the typewriter, then back to longhand, finally straight from that to computer composition. He uses email all the time. It has changed his life. He also uses the Web in his research, searching online bibliographies, reading online versions of books, reading, occasionally, online journals, and so on. He does not, however, use chatgroups or play computer games. His ‘other lives’ are still lived primarily through reading books that are physical objects you can hold in your hand. To some degree, however, Horace is, perhaps more than he realizes or is willing to admit, a cyberperson as well as a paperperson. If Jimjim listens to MP3 songs all the time, Horace listens to classical music much of the time, even when he is reading or writing. He plays it on the CD player in his computer and now on his iPod. If Horace writes literary criticism, Jimjim writes poetry and fiction. He is admirably adept at expressing himself clearly and succinctly, as the quotations from him indicate. Far from being made illiterate by the computer, Jim has, through constant practice in emails and chatgroups, acquired an impressive clarity and force in his use of language. For some people at least, those with a gift for language, using email and ICQ is splendid training in doing what you want with words. I conclude that much overlapping in the two kinds of selfhood and community-belonging, the two kinds of virtual automobility, exist and will go on existing for the foreseeable future. I can, responsibly, choose to belong to both worlds, as long as I am willing to take the consequences for that mixed existence, or double life.

Third conclusion: Though major differences exist between the two types of persons, they are also in one striking way alike. Both literature and cyberspace are forms of secular magic, to borrow a phrase from Simon During. Just what do I mean by that? During (2002) has admirably traced the history of magic shows and entertainments, from Greek and Roman antiquity to the Renaissance and then down to the early twentieth century. He has discussed the relation of magic to literature as part of this history. He is interested primarily in works like E. T. A. Hoffmann's Kater Murr or Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique. Such works have a more or less direct relation to magic shows. During does not explicitly observe, however, that all printed literary works, whether or not they overtly refer to magic practices, can be thought of as a species of magic. Horace's form of virtual automobility, like Jimjim's, is a species of secular magic. A work of literature is an abracadabra or hocus pocus that opens a new world. During has something to say about the way cinema extended magic shows, for example by being based in part on magic-lantern projections that were long a part of magic stage presentations. Eventually cinema put stage magic out of business. Movies had the stronger force, a bigger Zumbah, to borrow Harold Bloom's borrowing of an expressive African word for magic energy (personal communication to the author).

During also does not observe that modern communications technologies, from trick photography, to the telephone, to cinema, to radio, to television, to recordings on disks, tapes, or CDs, to the computer connected to the Internet, fulfill in reality old dreams of magic communication, at a temporal or spatial distance, with the living or with the dead. I can, any time I like, hear Glenn Gould play Bach's Goldberg Variations, with fingers long turned to dust. I can even hear Alfred Lord Tennyson reciting his poems. Talk about raising ghosts!

As Laurence Rickels has shown (1988: esp. chs. 7, 8; 1989), in the early days of both the telephone and the tape recorder, people believed they were hearing the voices of the dead (usually their mothers) behind the voices of the living, or through the static, on a telephone connection or a tape recording. These teletechnologies have gradually displaced not only magic stage assemblages, but also that other fading form of secular magic: literature. Radio, cinema, television, CDs, VCRs, MP3 gadgets, iPods, computers, and the Internet have become our dominant far-seeing and far-hearing conjurers, sorcerers, prestidigitators, animators of talking heads. These devices are, in short, our chief purveyors of magic shows and virtual motility. They have incalculable power to determine ideological belief, just as books did in the age of the book, the paper period.

Fourth conclusion: Just what can be said, on the basis of my thought experiment, of the differences between paperpersons and cyberpersons? Some of the differences are, to me at least, quite surprising. I would not have thought of them if I had not performed my thought experiment. To some degree they suggest that it is better to be a cyberperson than a paperperson.

Horace is to a considerable degree more private, more alone and lonely, than Jimjim. Reading a literary work, or even writing one, not to speak of writing a commentary on one, is a solitary activity. It is even to some degree narcissistic, as a passage in Anthony Trollope's An Autobiography suggests. In this passage Trollope is speaking of the way he was ostracized as a youth at Harrow because he was a day-pupil at an elite boarding school and had little pocket-money or good clothes. He says that since play with the other boys was denied him, he had to make up his own solitary play for himself. ‘Play of some kind was necessary to me then, – as it has always been’, he says. Trollope's solitary play took the form of what today we would call ‘daydreaming’: ‘Thus it came to pass that I was always going about with some castle-in-the-air firmly built within my mind. Nor were these efforts in architecture spasmodic, or subject to constant change from day to day. For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions and proprieties and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced, – not even anything which from outward circumstances would seem to be violently improbable.’ Sounds somewhat like one of those long-continued computer games, does it not, except that Trollope played by himself? Trollope himself makes an explicit assertion that his published novels were a transformation of his youthful habit of daydreaming. Speaking of that bad habit, Trollope says, ‘There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice, but I have often doubted whether, had it not been my practice, I should ever have written a novel. I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life’ (Trollope, 1996: 32–3). All writers and readers of novels are addicted to this ‘dangerous mental practice’.

Jimjim, on the contrary, is actively engaged with other people in those chatgroup interchanges or in playing SubSpace. He is not nearly so much narcissistically alone. The Internet and many things reachable through it pride themselves on being ‘interactive’. ‘Interactive’ is a leitmotif of the Net. A tremendous amount of linguistic exuberance and creativity is required for the various uses of the Web Jimjim habitually makes, day after day, for many hours a day. As David Crystal's Language and the Internet shows, new languages or idioms within standard English are rapidly being created by Internet users. Moreover, insofar as Jimjim is what he is through selves he becomes on the Net, he is actively engaged in a remarkable process of self-fashioning.

Reading a book, however much it requires active response and even intervention, is a more or less passive, receptive activity. Horace sits alone in his easy chair letting the words of Wuthering Heights do his magic dreaming for him. He is much more likely than Jimjim, therefore, to have his selfhood determined for him by way of his ‘literary subjectivity’, whereas Jimjim is creating his selfhood or selfhoods, even though he is subject, of course, to the ‘rules of the game’. If belonging to a community of friends and associates is a good thing, the normal situation for human beings, Jimjim much more obviously has that through his decisive participation in cybergroups than does Horace alone with Emily Brontë, or, earlier in his life, resisting all attempts by his mother to persuade him to ‘go out and play with the other children’, when he was deep in The Swiss Family Robinson or some such book. Moreover, these cybercommunities really do, after all reservations have been made, seem to constitute separate subcultures not straightforwardly subservient to the dominant national culture. Each develops, to some degree, judgments, values, and ethical standards of its own. This might be allegorized in the way so many computer games involve the creation of imaginary states with their own laws and customs.

Are cyberspace communities of dissensus possible?

Communities in cyberspace are therefore, to some degree at least, communities of dissensus, places where perhaps some independent political thinking may be possible. This, in my view, is an extremely good thing. Diversity and independence are, or should be, major aspects of any country's national and transnational character. The need for this is particularly acute in the United States today, at a time when the call to think like everyone else, on pain of being accused of disloyalty, is so much a part of the ‘wartime’ mentality. A terrifying example of that, terrifying to me at least, was a television ad for the travel industry that was broadcast in the United States after 9/11, when the air travel industry was in trouble. It shows bits of a speech by George W. Bush echoed in robot fashion by a series of individuals or groups associated with the air travel industry. The point of the ad was to persuade viewers that it was patriotic to travel in the aftermath of 9/11. ‘Americans are asking, “What is expected of us?”’ Bush was shown saying, and the others repeated in somnambulistic echo, ‘Americans are asking, “What is expected of us?”’; ‘Americans are asking, “What is expected of us?”’ What is expected of us is that we should travel for our country and to save the travel industry. It's our patriotic duty. ‘And we will’, says Bush in another clip, echoed again by airline personnel: ‘And we will’, ‘and we will’, ‘and we will’, in hypnotic entrancement of the viewer, who is by this time glassy-eyed and in no condition to travel. This was a sitting president of the United States allowing his talking head to be used to make a commercial pitch! Jimjim's chatgroups or computer games sound pretty healthy to me, by comparison. That ad has today (2005) long since disappeared from United States television screens.

I judge, on the basis of the conclusions I have drawn from my thought experiment, that it is better to be Jimjim than Horace. Matters are not quite so simple, however. For one thing, both Horace and Jim are exhorted, interpellated, called upon in various ways to be what they are by many other ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses) than just literary works for Horace and the Net for Jim. School, television, cinema, newspapers, magazines, not to speak of police and politicians, all play a role. Horace now, sixty years after 1946, watches television, including network news, but he also seeks out Cursor.org, an alternative news source on the web. Jimjim watches much less television than Horace does, though probably more movies, but of course those MP3s are not innocent of ideological content either. The literary works that have made Horace what he is are, to be sure, to a considerable degree canonical purveyors of Western ideology, for example, assumptions about middle-class courtship and marriage in Anthony Trollope's novels. Nevertheless, even canonical works are also in part critiques of reigning ideologies. That is certainly true for Wuthering Heights. That novel is hardly a straightforward argument for patriarchal gender hierarchy or for bourgeois marriage and family life. Trollope's novels too, though more covertly, are critique as well as indoctrination of Victorian ideologies. Trollope by no means approved wholeheartedly of the way his contemporaries got a life or ‘lived now’, to echo the title of his The Way We Live Now (1874–5).

On the other side of the ledger, again, Jimjim's computer games are not innocent. They often glorify war, as in the many space battle games, such as SubSpace, or they set up imaginary countries that are at war with other countries, in perpetuation of nationalist ideologies that globalization may, or should, be weakening. Lots of violence is present in some, though by no means all, computer games. The geeks who make them up are not isolated from mainstream youth ideologies. The Internet, moreover, has rapidly been co-opted by business interests. Like Wired magazine, it is now a tool of capitalism. It is hard to use the Net without being subject to commercial bombardment by flashing ‘cookies’ and other appeals to consumerist greed.

A game of SubSpace, on the one hand, and Wuthering Heights, on the other, are, to put it mildly, quite different virtual realities in which to live. The difference, however, is not that one is violent and the other a canonical assertion of traditional humanistic values. Wuthering Heights, like the Bible or like the work of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, or Toni Morrison, is full of shocking violence. Nor is the difference one of the relative gender stability in canonical literature as opposed to gender ambiguity in cyberspace. Wuthering Heights was written by a woman, Emily Brontë, who published under a male-sounding pseudonym, ‘Ellis Bell’, and who used a male narrator, Lockwood, who records the narration of Nelly Dean, as well as declarations spoken to Nelly by Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, or letters written by Isabella and others. The reader becomes in turn, in imagination, all these virtual people. Talk about avatars and the adoption of alternative personalities!

I have written so far, to some degree, as though Wuthering Heights and a game of SubSpace were just different forms of a universal imaginary automobility, each appropriate to the media of its own age. This is of course not the case. The adept reader of Wuthering Heights, Horace for example, creates, on the basis of the words on the page, an inner space. For this novel, the inner space through which the reader ‘moves’ is made up of a Yorkshire landscape, the two houses and the ‘Chapel of Gimmerden Sough’, in their locations in relation to one another in that landscape, and the interiors of the two houses, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The latter are specified in terms of windows, doors, and interior spaces within interior spaces. The reader cannot actually see what the author had in mind. He or she can only improvise an imaginary space by means of the words. The consequence is that these spaces and the virtual movements the reader makes through those spaces probably differ quite a bit from one person to another, or even from one reading to another by the same person. This form of virtual automobility is, moreover, relatively passive. It is relatively independent of ‘body language’, of small muscular movements of hands, legs, and torso. The latter are essentially necessary in order to play computer games. I do not know that empirical investigations of this have ever been attempted. It would be an important project. Some authors and some readers have provided maps of a given novel's scene. These exist for Trollope, for Hardy, for Conrad, for Faulkner, and no doubt for others. Films made from novels are further evidence. My reaction to such films is often, but not always, to say, ‘No, no! It's not like that. You have got those rooms all wrong.'

SubSpace, like all computer games, is quite different. SubSpace is an example of the well-known current shift from verbal media to graphic media, as instruments for the generation of imaginary spaces and of virtual automobility within them. Just what is the difference? I shall specify two of the most important. The graphic spaces of computer games, like those of cinema or television, are laid out before the viewer's eyes. He or she has relatively little freedom for the free exercise of imagination in making an inner space. Second difference: computer games, as we know, are ‘interactive’. The game-spaces become internalized. The keyboard, joystick, and screen come to seem extensions of the player's body, just as is the case in a different way for the book a reader holds in his or her hands, and just as various chapters in this book stress the way the automobile comes to seem an extension of the driver's body (see especially Mark Dery, in this volume). Virtual movement through a game space is unlike the minimal eye movements and page turnings of the book reader. It requires active muscular and somatic movements of hand and body. It demands high skill in hand-eye coordination. You don't just sit there and read. You have to do something. Often, if you do not do something fast and do it right, you will be killed: ‘Game over!’ A novel just waits there for me to read it. I conclude that verbal virtual automobility and graphic virtual automobility are radically different.

The ultimate result of my thought experiment is that it is better to be a cyberperson than to be a paperperson, though the issue is complex, as I have tried to show. It appears to be a basic feature of human beings, at least as presently socialized, that they need virtual realities or magic shows of some sort or other. These have immense effect on the way people lead their lives, on the way people think, feel, and interact with their fellows, even on the way they decide to go to war or on how they vote. Many of the United States and British soldiers in Iraq have no doubt been brought up on computer games. Clips of soldiers breaking into Iraqi houses, or of smouldering cars, debris, and body parts after a car bomb has gone off, shown repeatedly on television news broadcasts, at least in the United States, look suspiciously like moments in certain computer games. Virtual realities, it may be, determine the way ‘real realities’ are presented by the media. By a remarkable piece of serendipity, I encountered, as I was writing this essay, an article in Wired by Bill Werde that tells how one company, Kuma, is making ‘reality games’ based on events in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example the capture of Saddam Hussein, or the killing of his two sons, or the rescue of soldiers trapped in a March 2002 firefight in Afghanistan. ‘About a month after a battle’, says Werde, ‘Kuma will release a videogame version with tactics, weapons, and terrain reconstructed thanks to the sort of research normally reserved for, well, journalists’ (Werde, 2004: 104). These games allow a single player to perform the role of a soldier involved in these events, and, in virtual reality of course, changing what actually happened. These games build, no doubt, on the identification television viewers may already have felt when these events were shown as news. ‘The look of the games owes much to the news as well’, says Werde. ‘Every mission is introduced with a simulated TV spot, and military analysis is provided by retired Marine major general Thomas L. Wilkerson, who explains tactics, such as why the US needed those TOW missiles [to get Hussein's sons]’ (Werde, 2004: 105). Real events as shown on television news and virtual events in computer games become less and less distinguishable. Each contaminates the format of the other, and, as we know, form is meaning. The medium is the message. Our behaviour and judgment in the real world are strongly influenced by the view of things computer games enforce, just as used to be the case with that older form of magic shows, printed novels, and just as is still the case for those addicted to novels, like Horace. Can it be that George W. Bush plays computer games? We know that he watches American football on television and that he during the run-up to the 2004 election attended the Daytona 500 car race. A significant segment of those who vote for him are racecar drivers and the people who habitually attend car races or watch them on television. Car race computer games are of course an important subset of the genre. The ideologies of those who will lead the United States, at least until 2008, are steeped in the auto-mobile side of United States culture: our passion for fast cars, SUVs, ‘peeckup trucks’ (as they are sometimes called in California), Hummers, military tanks, and humvees.

Specialists in literary or culture studies have done much work investigating the way literary works, as a feature of capitalism (by way of the paper, book, and periodicals industries), have created, reinforced, and sometimes contested reigning ideologies. So many people now play computer games and have their beliefs, commitments, and political actions to some degree affected by them, that serious investigation of computer games urgently needs to be done by those in popular culture studies or in cultural studies. Playing computer games is the way a lot of people get a life these days. A provocative essay in The New York Times Technology section, Michael Erard's ‘The Ivy-Covered Console’ (2004), indicates in some detail how this new discipline is now being developed, with journals, websites, and conferences at places like Princeton University. Such study is one way academics might have of holding the surrounding culture of virtual automobility to some degree at arm's length, if they happen to want to do that. Such study could also be one form of possibly effective contestation.