Anthropological dimensions of virtualization

Abstract

Virtualization is an ongoing process that is transforming daily activities and interactions. Such transformations will be reflected in irreversible changes in the organization and functioning of societies (socio-historical changes).Virtualization is built by reconstructing information and communication functions that set us apart as human beings and that are specific to our societies. This text deals with the performance of these basic functions when the world is virtualized. The possible scenarios of a virtualized future are diverse and sometimes opposed. They will depend on the social uses made of virtualization for the performance of such basic functions. Such uses will be guided by the plans of the mediators that eventually prevail in the virtualization process. In this work, such social uses and their plans to date are identified and the foreseeable effects in the future are analyzed. From this anthropological and socio-historical view, the practice and teaching of communication are examined, as a mediating instance of virtualization; and virtualization as a form of social production of communication. The existing social applications of the new benefits provided by virtualization, and those that can be envisaged, relate to the applications and functions of scientific and technological innovations that are typical of monopolistic and globalized social formations. For these analyses, theory and methodologies that are published in previous works are developed and applied. In the notes I include the links to some of these works that are accessible and open on the internet. But these developments are based on empirical research that has been developed for over five years, which originates the data that support what is told herein.