3 Images Invading the Body

In the 1980s, several major developments in image technology were to have enormous impact on individual behavior and group activity, in a Western and global context. There was a huge rise in video gaming and console production in the 1980s, oscillating between the US and Japan; in 1989, CERN's "distributed computing" system became the medium with which Tim Berners-Lee was to write the World Wide Web; and in the late 1980s virtual reality (VR) was poised to move from an operative, but relatively little known, immersive multimedia system, designed for the military and gaming industries, to a revolutionary computer technology as potentially lucrative as the Internet has worked out to be. During this period in the US, there was a widely held view among technologists, artists, and theorists, as well as various corporations and management consultants, that the Internet and VR would evolve in tandem to create a new spatial frontier with vast potential for its participants or inhabitants, or for those enterprises able to marshal those participants or inhabitants.