Virtualization

Virtualization, as coined in McCormick's account of contemporary networked sociality, names the structural collapse of the classical distinction between the assembled crowd and the dispersed public. Classical crowd theory — from Le Bon through Tarde — presupposed that mass physical co-presence dissolved individual interiority into collective affect, whereas publics, constituted through mediated address across distance, preserved reflective individuality. McCormick's theoretical move inverts this assumption: mobile communication technologies so thoroughly interpenetrate the two formations — presence and absence, the near and the far — that their opposition can no longer be maintained as structurally distinct. The result is virtualization: a condition in which being physically with others and being communicatively linked to absent others are no longer sequential or alternative social arrangements but synchronous, co-occurring operations that mutually constitute one another.

The concept thus designates not simply "going digital" in a colloquial sense, but a specific socio-structural inversion. Where the crowd was defined by the erosion of individual interiority through proximity, and the public by its reconstitution through distance, virtualization renders both vectors simultaneously active — separation and congregation, distance and proximity, become two faces of a single communicative gesture. This inversion is what McCormick calls "networked individualism" operating at the level of assembled social form: the individual is neither swallowed by the crowd nor isolated in a public sphere, but perpetually suspended between both poles at once.

Within the source samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, virtualization functions as a culminating theoretical coinage that draws together the book's running conceptual vocabulary. It explicitly cross-references the Networked Individual and Individualization as the social-structural substrate it describes: the networked individual is precisely the subject-form that makes virtualization possible, since it is neither the crowd-absorbed mass individual nor the detached public-sphere citizen, but a node whose social ties are radially distributed across presence and absence simultaneously. Virtualization is thus an extension and specification of networked individualism, naming what happens at the level of assembled social form when that subject-type becomes normative.

In relation to the broader cross-referenced canonical concepts, virtualization stands in an interesting tension with both Ideology and Singularity. Read through the Ideology frame, virtualization could be understood as a structural condition that operates below conscious assent — much as ideology in the post-Lacanian sense functions not through false belief but through behavioral and libidinal enactment — since the interpenetration of crowd and public is not chosen or reflected upon but simply enacted through device use. The collapse of structural distinction it names echoes the ideological operation of rendering a historically specific arrangement natural and invisible. Against the Singularity frame, virtualization raises the question of whether the synchronous interpenetration of near and far dissolves or intensifies singularity: the networked individual is simultaneously a singular node (irreplaceable point of connection) and one instance among mass-reproduced social patterns, a tension that the concept of virtualization holds in suspension without resolving. The concepts of Crowds and Publics serve as the direct theoretical foil that virtualization is defined against and is said to render obsolete as structurally discrete categories.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.307)

Separation from the near and congregation from afar become synchronous exercises in virtualization.

The theoretical charge of the quote lies in its pairing of "separation from the near" and "congregation from afar" as synchronous rather than alternative exercises: the word "synchronous" is the pivot, because it denies the temporal and structural sequentiality on which the crowd/public distinction depended, and "exercises in virtualization" nominates this simultaneity as a new social-structural practice rather than a mere technological feature.