A Rhetorical Warning of Awareness of Reality in Jennifer Haley’s The Nether

Abstract

In many societies around the globe, activities in cyberspace have become a part of everyday life, and for many people it is often hard to distinguish them from real-world activities. The replaceability of physical reality with cyber reality has been a controversial issue in recent times. As the probability of mimetic representation develops with technologies of verisimilitude like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), users of the augmenting devices may begin to believe the altered forms of reality to be real and that the cyber experiences are being directly experienced.<BR> As a platform for considering the controversies surrounding mimetic representation in digital spaces, Jennifer Haley’s play The Nether presents disturbing problems on the horizons of the near future associated with the cyberspace representation. This essay scrutinizes a rhetorical warning about the issues surrounding immersion into digital mimetic representation before such it becomes omnipresent and impossible to distinguish from physical reality.