Political and social potentialities of tele-immersive media: critique and tipologies of the ‘virtual’

This paper uses a critical interdisciplinary method to explore the process of redefinition of presence within the discourses of the metaverse and VR, particularly by Big Tech or platform capitalism companies marketing of virtual travel media. For this end, critical discourse analysis is applied in the context of qualitative platform studies. The paper examines the use of digital means to subvert scale and transcend the dimensions at which human contact, social and political action and events typically occur. This raises the question: what exactly is being mediated and which aspects of place are being re-mediated? Alongside a widespread belief that a media culture of distance and passive reception has ended, the promises and perils of the virtual are linked to the hopes of redefining and continuing community, both local and global, and (dis)ordering the social. Lastly, the paper identifies, through a speculative critique method, two parallel trends in the process of virtualizing places and spaces designing a typology for virtualization or tele-immersiveness: an ontological/epistemological mode (representational or correlational) and a periled sociopolitical mode, and oposes them to the concept and pratices of operational materialism.