From Virtuality to Augmented Reality

This open access book explores the thin precipice between sociality and violence, illuminating the false economy of the ‘social’ online and its intrinsic bind with violence as its default position and human subjugation. This book argues that the notion of ‘social’ online is intimately welded to violence and such that the notion of ‘sociality’ is constantly tested and transgressed online, invoking a form of socially-anchored violence which is both spectacularized and normalized, as well as bound with the everyday. It seeks to deconstruct this naturalization of violence as a form of violence in itself and equally critiques the political economy of the social as an architecture which engenders violence as a default position invoking the technical and affective domains which pattern our responses (i.e. reciprocity, emojis, reactionary, instant gratification). By interrogating the notion of ‘social’ on social media platforms (from our nascent notions of virtuality to the contemporary iterations of Metaverse), From Virtuality to Augmented Reality contends that the political economy of the ‘social’ premising on the notion of ‘sociality’ is intimately bound with the counter elements of the social; foregrounded particularly on the visceral, the reactionary and permutations of violence. The underpinning contention is that the ‘social’ has materialized through a particular political economy which conjoins the social imaginaries of emancipation with a technical infrastructure in which an affective realm is intimately bound with the workings of platform capital. In this way, the ‘social’ becomes divested from sociality and human communion and as a means to mobilise mob cultures, hate, misogyny and violence. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Queen Mary University of London.