Abstract
The role of language in thinking and reasoning about technology and society is examined with respect to the naming of new technologies.
The paper first describes the evolution of the word ‘artificial’ through its use in ‘artificial intelligence’ and argues that a common interpretation of the latter term was made possible by an ambiguity in its constituent terms. Emphasis is then placed upon the word ‘virtual’, arguing that its traditional use was first adapted to meet the general needs of computing, and then a more specialized meaning has emerged associated with the concept of ‘virtual reality’. This new sense is roughly synonymous with ‘potential’.
Empirical evidence is provided of the use of the word, based upon various dictionary defmitions, quantitative research using electronic corpuses (the British National Corpus, INSPEC database of scientific and technological abstracts, and three newspapers) and a discussion of definitions given by practitioners and theoreticians in the field.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Beardon, C. (1997). What does it mean to be ‘virtual’?. In: Berleur, J., Whitehouse, D. (eds) An Ethical Global Information Society. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35327-2_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35327-2_14
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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