Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles
In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.
1143667057
In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles
In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.
107.95
In Stock
51
In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles
In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.
Lisa Messeri is faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Yale Universityand author of Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds, also published by Duke UniversityPress.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix Prologue xiii Introduction: Fantasy and Technology 1 Part I. Fantasy of Place 27 1. Desert of the Unreal: Histories, Futures, and Industries of Reality Repair 31 2. Realities Otherwise: Understanding VR by Experiencing LA 51 3. Tinseltown and Technology: Producing Virtual Reality in the Dream Factory 75 Part II. Fantasy of Being 101 4. Being and the Other: Dismantling the Façade of the Empathy Machine 105 5. Special Affect: An Empathy Machine Otherwise 133 Part III. Fantasy of Representation 155 6. VR's Feminine Mystique: A Technology of the #MeToo Moment 159 7. Making Innovation Women’s Work: Storytelling and Worldbuilding for “Tech” Otherwise 181 Epilogue 201 Notes 209 Bibliography 249 Index 277
