Liminal

In the immersive enviornment of cyberspace people are able reinvent who they are or be very candid about who they truley are. The computer allows people to become connected to the cyber world along with the feeling of simultaneously being unconnected. Janet Murray refers to the computer as a liminal object (Murray 99). What she means by this is that the computer allows us to have a sensory threshold that gives the user a feeling of being totally immersed in the cyberspace, but at the same time creating a buffer between reality and cyber reality. People feel that the liminal elements of the computer allow us to drop some of the inhabitions and barriers that we may have in the real world.

Works Cited

Murray, Janet Hamlet on the Holodeck