Panic About Virtual Panic

This article makes a good point about the impending moral panics of VR, in regard to its effect on the brain and psyche.

VR really isn't an evolution of film. You can't easily "cut" in VR because the film metaphor isn't there, yet the consciousness-as-film is as a "rift".

We've gotten so used to the pacing of cuts in film, that rapid scene changes would probably drive people crazy in VR. The real "cut" is when you take the headset off and walk into the blinding existential nature of the real world.

There's an interesting vignette in the quirky book "Astonish yourself! 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life", where you are to be mindful and inspired by walking into daylight after being in a dark theater for two hours.

No. 74: Leave the Cinema in the Daytime
Duration: About 90 minutes
Effect: Disjointed

"The cinema has emptied you of your current preoccupations and filled you with its images. It has washed you of time and it's uniformity. You reach the corridor or staircase that leads outside. Under the lights, you recover some portion of the normal world. But as yet it's only a passage, a moment of transition. And then you open the door. Outside, it's sunny. You have forgotten that. Totally. You wonder how it's possible, not your forgetting, but this daylight. (EXT, day). It wasn't in the script. It ought to be dark outside, as it usually is...But no. It's very bright, and it hurts your eyes a bit...For you, duration has become distended. It has made a large pocket that has contained the plot of the film, its landscapes, your emotions, and perhaps whole lifetimes. Fairly quickly, the whole question fades and then disappears. But only by neglect or distraction. It is never really settled."

That's what VR might do.

Slavoj Zizek also made the excellent observation that it's not that we don't have any more private spaces, it's that we don't have enough public spaces that we all participate and care for because we're so atomized into the private zones of our networked selves. VR will make that terribly worse, without making clean and logical cuts to everyday life.