The Virtual Window, A Reading Response

Anne Friedberg’s The Virtual Window is a look at what windows have come to mean to humanity over time. Originally windows were a means of bringing light and ventilation into a dwelling but then with the development of glass, windows became more of a status symbol. Glass was expensive and made it possible to bring in light and a view of the world outside without also bringing in the weather. Glass windows to the wealthy became like paintings or photos, growing in size and quantity, and offering a panoramic view of the world to the viewer. And just like art, not everyone was lucky enough, or wealthy enough, to possess one.



Film created a new sort of window, a window that showed a different view of the world. Film had the ability to show not only “reality” as the filmmaker sees it, but film could also show fiction, an aspect of human life that had not yet been viewed in such a “realistic” sense. And then after film there was television, a window that brought the entire world as well as entire worlds of thought right into everyone’s living room. Television was so pervasive and so adept at bringing the world home, it was hard to imagine another device that could bring more “real life” inside. The computer screen, though, is a window that has a much greater ability then the television to bring “reality” home. You can view films and television shows through your computer, any image or piece of art, and just about any piece of information or misinformation. But the computer has also created a major shift in our view of reality through the onset of “virtual worlds” and “virtual reality.”
Anne Friedberg comments on how the window, or the virtual window, seems to be growing increasingly transparent. The distance between the viewing public and the reality shown to them is becoming increasingly short. As Anne Friedberg says, “Virtual images radically transformed the twentieth-century understanding of reality, and yet most virtual images were seen in frames and through frames. Which technologies will break through the frame and have us climb through the metaphoric window?” (Friedberg, page 348) This passage seems to ask the key question. When will windows come full circle? Windows began without glass and it seems that soon we will be able to go through them again.
Windows are close to coming full circle, from something to let the world in (glassless widows), to something though which we see the world (glass windows), to something through which we view an individual’s idea of the world (film, TV), to something through which we see a virtual reality (computer screen). All of these types of windows have frames, but only one of them allows you to go through it into the world it shows. But when will this virtual reality we see through our computers become yet another “real” world that we can walk around in. Already there are people who seem to completely live in these virtual worlds as they often seem more real that the world outside our glass windows. When will the frame be taken away? Its only a matter of time before we will be able to step through this virtual window and into the new reality. “Is the ‘age of windows’ – and by extension, the age of screens – reaching…its end?” (Friedberg, 349)