An Attempt to Determine the Csr Potential of the International Clothing Business

By Thomas Laudal (PhD), Stavanger, NORWAY

ABSTRACT:

The technology associated with Virtual Reality will change our

understanding of what "information" is, and blur the distinction

between reality and virtual reality - between the real world and

the emerging virtual worlds. These effects are not dependent

though on perfect interfaces, or extreme processing power, they

are rather byproducts of the deceptive quality of the multimedia

technology which already exists. Virtual worlds will be part of

our global community where identification and political

participation (democracy) traditionally has been linked to local

territory. Will we see Virtual Worlds undermine identification

and political participation, or may they offer new means of

identification and participation?

CONTENTS:

1. THE ANATOMY OF VIRTUAL WORLDS

2. CONVERGENCE BETWEEN THE VIRTUAL AND THE REAL 2.1.

PREDICTABILITY AND ORIGIN AS DISTINGUISHING CRITERIA 2.2. MATTER

AND ENERGY AS DISTINGUISHING CRITERIA 2.3. VIRTUAL AND REAL

WORLDS 2.4. ROBOTS AND REAL COMMUNITIES 2.5. ROBOTS, TIME AND

SPACE 2.6. SUPPLEMENTING UNIVERSAL LINEAR TIME

3. OUR COMMUNITY 3.1. EXPANDING PUBLIC SPACE 3.2. DEMOCRACY: THE

NEED FOR GLOBAL AND ISSUE-SPECIFIC CONSTITUENCIES 3.3.

REDISTRIBUTION AND SOLIDARITY

1. THE ANATOMY OF VIRTUAL WORLDS

This essay concerns the development of Virtual Reality (VR) and

its long term effect on our society. As a starting point, I have

tried to envisage the totality of all coded information in the

VR-worlds of the future. This bird=B4s-eye perspective enables us

to see the qualitative differences between various categories of

information and to describe the various categories of information

which belongs to still unknown technologies. By allowing our

selves to name these categories, we may focus on the major

implications VR will have on human beings self-image and

ultimately, on the human beings position as the controller and

superior intellect on the planet earth. In the last part I will

discuss how this information technology might influence our

community, and particularly our capacity to act collectively and

promote an egalitarian society.

To follow these lines, we need a description of likely future

elements of the VR technology. The main areas of improvement in

hardware, software design and user-interfaces are pretty easy to

name: There is no disagreement among experts that the basic

capacities, like processor speed and the amount of memory will

continue to improve. The disagreement concerns the pace and

limits of these improvements, not the direction. - This is why it

is possible to make a sketch of certain parts of our future

information society, without residing to free fantasy.

The following text presuppose that the increasing capacity of

computers will continue in more or less the same pace as today in

the next century to come <1> :

Let us call all forms of coded information for "information

objects". An information object may be "any amount of coded

information which is treated, or regarded, by human beings as

discrete entities, with certain functional properties".

I propose the following main categories of information objects:

CONTROLLERS Objects which controls or steer something in a way

which allows the effects which it causes in its environment to be

determined in advance. This is the traditional notion of linear

computer programmes today; codes which defines a stream of output

which again causes predictable effects in its environment. The

controllers will act as "machine language" (the modules which all

other information objects consists of) analogous to genes in

living species in the real world. "To programme" would mean to

use controllers (which will include natural language) - to

communicate, or instruct, other objects in the real or virtual

world. The current linear programmes, including their syntaxes,

is a subcategory of controllers. Examples: The authorises

vocabulary allowed in a specific network, or a routine to swap

two pieces of data. The emergence of standardised product

nomenclatures like the UNCCS in UN and the CPA in the EU could be

seen as the first primitive attempts to include