Shalt Thou Enhance Thee? VR, Self, Education
It was years ago during a sweltering, sunny South Florida Saturday afternoon; some neighbors had carried all sorts of items out to their own front yards for a typical yard sale. I happened to walk by and decided to snoop around before heading to my part-time weekend job.
This sublime soul, a Bible-preaching 60 plus year-old African-American lady — who only called me ‘child’ all the time — had her stuff packed up outside…a Betamax player from the 80s, a humongous stack of “Sh*t Happens” t-shirts and some books. Well, I had to buy myself at least one of those t-shirts!
At first, the book section seemed quite uninteresting to cherry-pick from, until I bumped into a 1984 first edition of a book called: The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit.
Something clicks inside when you read a title like that. The book authoress was Dr. Sherry Turkle, who nowadays happens to be Director of MIT Initiative on Technology and Self Program in Science and Technology. So I bought that old-time hardcover for a nickel and dime. Just guess what I found in the Introduction:
“ Technology catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think. It changes people’s awareness of themselves, of one another, of their relationship with the world…It challenges our notions not only of time and distance, but of mind.”
…Mind, or whatever that word means and what we mean to express with it, is also a result of education, through the physical tool we call ‘brain’. For those of us who consider education as the backbone of the future, Virtual Reality (VR) is much more than just a way of escapism as we have seen in most sci-fi films — well, go and ask any jailer.
Whether through gamification or by developing content that abides by a more traditional approach, this use of VR in education is still “a horse with no name”; video gaming is quite a cash cow. It is easy to extrapolate how such gadgetry creates an immersive effect that could influence the way we and our youngsters look at the world, without losing touch with reality. You could laugh at me, but is there not a whiff of shamanism in all of this? What would late Terence McKenna say?
For companies in that specific field, this could be a very nice addendum to their Corporate Social Responsibility. Palmer Luckey, Founder of Oculus VR, shares in that marvelous adventure: to positively enhance human capabilities. Wired magazine article on Mr. Luckey testifies to this upcoming, catalyzing, and immersive mission to enrich minds by raising unusual questions, well beyond the barely productive mannerisms of Socrates.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
