p. 22 on virtual reality

« Few theorists addressed the interconnection of politics, culture, and technology more closely than Deleuze and Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari develop a concept, striation, that arguably emerges in part from the growing emphasis on computerization that was evident even in the 1970s, but that has sometimes been overlooked by media theorists in favor of what is clearly a misreading of Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of virtuality (see especially Lévy 2001).

The term virtual reality emerged in wide use (popularized in particular by the computer evangelist Jaron Lanier) after Deleuze and Guattari's pathbreaking work, and it is clear that Deleuze and Guattari intended the virtual to refer to a generic use of the term rather than to a computer-based phenomena (see De Landa 2002; Massumi 2002; Shields 2003; and Wark 2004 for more accurate discussions of what Deleuze and Guattari mean by the virtual and how it relates to the computer).

The idea that computers represent a better instantiation of «virtuality" than do the human brain or human society is a curious and curiously computer-centric notion, one that bespeaks the tremendous cultural power of computation itself. »