War of the Worlds: the Assault on Reality

Mark Z. Slouka argues that the perception of reality in America has been radically altered by the emergence of new technologies. The notion of reality as an empirical shared state of existence has been particularly challenged by a revolution in the "virtual" technologies spawned by the computer industry. What is "real" in a society infiltrated by technologies which manipulate images, which replace the written word and which offer entire alternative cyberspace communities accessible only through the window of a computer screen? Slouka claims that reality itself is under siege and that, in particular, the cyberspace revolution has all the potency of a new religion - a cult which is eager to replace this world and its mundane grubbiness with a mathematically pure and clinically correct "heaven".