The linked article below from The New Yorker on the potential dangerous effects of VR misses an important point. It looks at VR as an isolated new development in electrified experience retrieval that, of itself, should be looked upon with suspicion.
Hello! Wake up and smell the extensions!
How quickly we seem to forget that Marshall McLuhan already described electrified environments, and how they envelop us like fish in water. VR is simply taking that to a further degree of "high fidelity."
What ought to be really scary in this is that it is the commercial ethos that directs all of these extensions, and expansions, and underlying that is everything that is bad about the hard sell.
You worry about horror in the more directly first person view? What about a constant saturation in whatever extra-stimulates so that you will buy into what ever is desired for you to buy into? A constant saturation that has become ever more pervasive and inescapable; filling every space you interact with not only mediated message, but with all of the objects clearly branded from all of those messages; each reinforcing the other.
How could you not to be at least a little more prone to fuck all of the time with all of the fucking going on around you (suggestively and outright), irrespective of any actual connection, but oh so clearly branded as a lifestyle. How could you not be at least a little more receptive to the rightness of "righteous revenge" when you binge watch shows like "Banshee," "Dare Devil," or even "Game of Thrones" (just to name few). How could you also not be at least a little more receptive to the notion of simple answers to complex questions when those shows, as well as a host of others, make intimidating, or beating, or even killing the right "bad" person so effective in solving problems.
What scares me the most about VR is that we will end up willingly giving the keys of direct connection to our minds to those who want to craft the "narrative" of society as a whole in ways that will being as greatly in their interest, and not ours, as will be consumingly entertaining.
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