Military historian and Navy Admiral, Alfred Mahan, said, “Whoever rules the waves rules the world.” He meant the waves of the waters of the rivers, lakes, and the seven seas that facilitate the world’s maritime trade.
But when you consider the use of voice and data in telecommunications and the Internet, you will agree that the airwaves, sometimes referred to as the Internet superhighway, can be substituted for the waves of the waters.
Virtual reality is transmitted digitally via the Internet or telecommunications lines. Though you can hear the sounds and see the images, you cannot touch them. They are optical illusions, and are therefore non-tactile.
But tactile or not, they appear real. The Thomas theorem of sociology, formulated by husband and wife sociologists team of William and Dorothy Thomas, says, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
W.I. Ross had earlier stated that any definition of a situation would influence the present. In other words, the human mind can conjure reality from non-reality. A racist would treat coloured people with lesser dignity if he thought they were beasts.
By the same token, a physician, in playing the illusionist, would contrive a placebo, a substance, or treatment with neither therapeutic nor healing properties, to induce a patient to believe they had been healed.
Online sales portals like Ali Baba and Jumia have caused disruptions to the business of physical retail shops. In June 2018, the House of Fraser, a United Kingdom departmental store holding, announced plans to close down 31, or more than half, of its 59 retail stores, and cutting jobs.
The convergence of broadcast, telecommunications, and computer technologies has exchanged the idle time of desktop computers for real real-time, on-the-go, access of Android telephones. This means that the nomad who cannot always travel with his cumbersome desktop or laptop, can access the Internet from his lightweight Android telephone anywhere.
The Android and the Internet have greatly enabled the actualisation of business decisions, or whims, at the speed of thought. The social media have empowered the salesman, the politician, and the canvasser of any commodity, to reach, mobilise, and get their audience to act immediately.
Albert Einstein reportedly declared that time is an illusion. But before his time, Plato had reasoned that the objects that human beings see are nothing but ideas, shadows, or mere appearances, which are not ever material. On the surface, this contradicts the thinking about the reality of materiality.
This theory that knocks materiality suggests that in reality, only intangible and non-material, are real, ageless, and incorruptible. An uncle would surely have difficulties remembering an adult that he last saw as a toddler.
The uncle may only connect the image of a toddler etched in his mind to the adult that has replaced the toddler if appropriately prompted by, say, an old photograph. Plato adds that the physical horse that can be seen or touched can vanish, and only the idea of the horse in your mind is indestructible and eternal.
If you got a microscope powerful enough, you could see the perpetual whirling motion of the particles of a wall, even though you can also visually perceive the “solid” wall with the naked eye. The difference between what you see via the microscope and what you see with the naked eye is the evidence that levels of reality vary.
Scientists who think like this will tell you that the seemingly impregnable Berlin Wall that separated East and West Berlin in the former Eastern Germany of the Cold War era was no more than a whorl of revolving particles. And that what the stern-looking East German police officers thought they were guarding was mere abstraction, or appearance.
Thus, mechanical engineers, who study the strength or tensility of materials, must recognise that their quest is a mere attempt to find out the degree of concentration of the particles of a supposed material within a given volume or space.
At various temperatures, water could be solid, liquid, or gas. If you watched the movie, “Avengers Infinity War,” the sequel to “African Panther,” of the Wakanda kingdom fame, released by Marvel Studios owned by the recently deceased Stan Lee, you would have seen real characters simply dissolve, first into powder, and then, into seeming nothingness. There were no more traces that they ever existed.
But they could not have been completely destroyed if you agree with the scientific wisdom that matter is neither created nor destroyed. It’s the same as when people that you know and can identify, die, are buried, and you can see them no more. In acknowledging this transmutation of reality, the Yoruba might say of the dead, “O pa’po da,” or have exchanged their state of being.
Those who understand the principle of optics insist that what you claim to perceive is actually an abstract of what is out there; and you don’t really “see” anything. Think of what you see as a “model” representing the real thing. But it could never be the real thing because it was conjured in the first place.
The reality of perception must be the reason why two individuals witnessed the same event but recorded different realties. The Nation newspaper’s columnist, Prof Olatunji Dare, explains this concept with the declaration that there is subjectivity in (the so-called) objectivity.
While Karl Marx argues that society and social relations are driven by economic determinism, the technological nerd insists that technology determinism is the driver. The biology, geography, economics, culture, education, and values of an individual are summed up in what social scientists describe as socio-economic status.
All these affect the way an individual thinks, speaks, and acts. That probably explains why communication scholars came up with the idea of selective exposure, selective attention, selective perception, and selective retention, which may not necessarily be intentional. It shows the way the individual is wired.
Something that had always being virtual is the value of national currencies. The notion of trust or fiduciary is responsible for attaching values to currencies. This, in turn, forms the basis for determining the exchange rate of material currencies and crypto currencies, or virtual money, like bitcoin.
Nigeria’s decision to officially exchange N305 for $1 demonstrates the level of confidence that the Central Bank of Nigeria, and not the American Federal Reserve Bank, has in the naira. And of course, only the CBN can reverse this self-inflicted burden of devaluing the naira.
This virtual concept is what also separates a brand from a product. The utilitarian value of a soap as a product is in its use for a bath or laundary. But when it progresses from a product to a brand, its value becomes aspirational, and not just utilitarian.
The man who travels from Abule Egba in the Lagos suburb to queue up at the Ikeja Mall just to buy a loaf of bread may just want to prove to his neighbour that Shoprite bread is aspirational, and not a mere product.
Consider also the Pentecostal Christian whose pastor turns the Olive oil product into a brand by proclaiming it as anointing oil. So, you can see that faith can transform a whim, desire, or thought into reality.
Never ever believe those who promise to remember you forever; like you, they too are transient, nay virtual.
– Twitter @lekansote1
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