The Mortality of the Virtual

Abstract

The question 'what is virtual culture?' touches on the general limits of culture, and specifically on those limits concerned with mortality and death. Here, the virtual culture of information is characterised as an interaction between two different socio-technical drives and processes- the archive and real-time drives. The question of how this interaction can be culturally signified is discussed firstly in terms of various tendencies to integrate the two processes on the basis of pre-existing limits of culture, and secondly in terms of a concept of 'dead-time' which is implicit to the interplay between technology and culture. The latter concerns the ways in which the limits of culture can never be fully experienced or represented within culture except as an irreparable loss of presence.