Peregrinaçőes Transcibernéticas

• Published in: Review of International American studies 2016, Vol.9 (1), p.43-64
• Main Author: de Aguiar, Ricardo Portella
• Format: Article
• Language: Portuguese
• Subjects: Communication studies; Comparative Study of Literature; Culture and social structure; Language and Literature Studies; Media studies; Other Language Literature; Social Sciences; Studies of Literature
• ISSN: 1991-2773; 1991-2773

The communicational model adopted today is radically different from that practiced in the past centuries. The essential human need for social interaction has been transformed by the use and abuse of the space available to all those who have access to a computer linked to the ‘Big Net’. This space, composed of many Virtual Territories, or Cyberterritories, has been called into existence by diverse, and equally virtual, Communities. Geographically disperse, but interlinked within a powerful system of communications, they all make up the Virtual World. In this world—owing to the development of Information Technology that gave birth to telecommunication networks that connect countless individual devices—multiple forms of language develop among the most astounding groupings of people, often without precise identification or precise location, against the backdrop of a new form of writing inaugurated at the onset of the Cybernetic Era—the Digital Text. The Virtual World—a binary tangle built on cyber artifacts—is home to much knowledge and, at the same time, an object of desire of modern man: simultaneously a figment of human imagination and a space made possible by both the rigidity of protocols and the flexibility of machine languages. A maze hiding a treasure which, in itself, is a portal leading us into other, countless, labyrinths. With the birth of the Virtual World, the familiar, albeit uncanny, experiences of the trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific peregrinations have become complemented by the experience of the virtual peregrination. We sail the infinite seas—and therein we become lost; bewildered wanderers, we follow vertiginous trails of Language and Technology. Enchroaching upon each of these possible territories within the vast space of the Virtual World, hesitant, perplexed by the plethora of possible choices, we become passive in the face of the immensity of the binary seas. This article addresses the issue of the peregrinations in the boundless territories recognizing no limitations and no subjectivity: territories in which everything that exists—is a metamorphosis.