The impact of digital information and communication systems upon all aspects of life has raised the question of the relation of the physical world to so-called “virtual reality.” Already such visionary thinkers as Norbert Wiener and J. C. L. Licklider had prophesized a human-computer symbiosis on the basis of automated information systems. Jean Baudrillard’s “hyperreality” described a situation in which the distinction between the physical and virtual realities no longer made any sense. New media studies have pointed out that business, politics, education, health care etc. are becoming increasingly determined by processes, activities, and communication that occur via digital media, digital information processing, and intelligent automated information systems. Indeed, new media studies have shown that a process of “transcoding” (Manovich) is reconfiguring the social along the lines of digital media, which amounts to admitting that new media are not media at all in the traditional sense, but general conditions of communicative action as such. Information is not a message, but condition of being, an ontological category. Much as Kantian categories new media are becoming the conditions of the possibility of constructing viable networks. If new media become general conditions of constructing social order, this has consequences for ontology and the understanding of the real.

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