This chapter deals with ways of living and socializing in the context of digital technological hybridism. The authors begin the discussion with the sub-topic, “Digital Virtual Life?” After that, they deal with living in digital virtual spaces of sharing and/or sharing of a digital virtual nature. Finally, they talk about configuring the digital virtual sharing space: society networking in the era of avatars. The authors conclude the chapter with a view of hybridism, where it is no longer possible to distinguish the individual and the social, the natural, and the technological.
TopIntroduction
Humanity has developed through the movements of reproduction, (re)signification, transformation and the creation of new concepts, theories, technologies and instruments aiming to improve human being’s lives. This has not always been the way though, or it is not totally possible, as we can see in the history of the German physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), who developed the theory of Relativity which gained him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. The development of atomic energy was made possible by the theory of Relativity, even though the benefits and drawbacks hadn’t been thoroughly contemplated. It is for the same reason that the developments of humanity also happened due to the need to adjust and modify things along living and sharing lines. Such adjustments and/or modifications regard theories, technologies, human beings and the comprehension of what “living better” is.
The title of this chapter comes from the perspective of a “digital virtual living space”, which initially proposes to (re)signify concepts such as space, living and the virtual digital as human beings start to establish relationships and interactions through daily living with different Digital Technologies. Within this context, and through research developed by GPe-dU UNISINOS/CNPq, we reconstruct the understanding of digital virtual living spaces by linking different contexts in different areas of knowledge Backes (2007, 2011), Schlemmer (2005, 2008) and Backes and Schlemmer (2006). We build some ideas about the nature of living in a digital virtual space, Backes (2011) and recreate the conceptual technology of Digital Virtual Sharing Spaces Schlemmer et al. (2006) and Schlemmer (2008, 2009, 2010).
In this reconstruction of the digital virtual living space, different Digital Technologies and human beings’ living and sharing mediated by them – as described in Chapter 3 – we have managed to bring together theorists from the areas of geography, Santos (1980, 2008), biology and human development, Maturana (1999, 2002, 2005) and Maturana and Varela (2002), sociology, Cuche (1999), Palloff (2002) and Castells (2003), Psycology, Turkle (1997; 1999), administration and technology, Pratt (2002), philosophy, Lévy (1996, 2010a, 2010b) and Negroponte (2005), who have presented the possibility of thinking the space in contemporary way. We then find new elements and other complexities, without establishing replacements or exclusions, but by constructing the living and sharing among human beings in a digital virtual way.
How should we think of such space? The space can be conceived from two perspectives: space in terms of the space of all time, permanent, topographically limited and specific to each place; or space as it is presented today, our space, the space of our time and as a group of relationships implied within a history of past and present. Therefore, Santos (1980, p.122) states that: