Sustainable Communicational Realities in the Age of Virtuality

—A communicational reality is a culturally-specific conceptualization of social space constructed and shared by people through the act of communication. This article examines the role of technology in the construction of communicational realities, acknowledging that it is neither a neutral tool nor an autonomous agent in the process. The knowledge of how we use technology to engender communicational realities must contribute to the critical awareness of the individual in relation to the world. This knowledge must ultimately allow us to disassociate communication from those technologizings that lead, through the creation of virtual realities, to the separation of the knower from the known. Only by taking a critical look at the assumptions that our communication technologies lead us to make about the world, can we begin a process of reconceptualizing them away from their position as commodities to that of vehicles for self-knowledge and tools for the understanding and transformation of the world. This article introduces the concept of the sustainable communicational reality as a way to assess the values promoted by different conceptualizations and applications of communication technologies in our societies.