To be telepresent means to be here and elsewhere at the same time.
Paul Virilio claims that Teletopia is now replacing both Atopia and Utopia.
"Cyberspace is a world unto itself, touching the conventional world at every point but remaining entirely distinct from it." (Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound, p. 275) virtual reality is an interface with cyberspace.
Novak characterizes cyberspace as a habitat for the imagination and as a triumph of poetry. Cyberspace is "poetry inhabited, and to navigate through it is to become a leaf on the wind of a dream." For him, cyberspace is " embodied fiction", and he stresses the freedom to change the fictions as "liquid" architecture. This profusion of ecstatic metaphors about cyberspace reaches an almost religious level of imagery, with cyberspace becoming the sacred to the (technological?) profane.
Contemporary discussions of the social dimension of cyberspace characterize it as a "Consensual hallucination" An interesting object of study are the imaginary enabling devices that seem to be required, often provided by science fiction. For example, William Gibson's novel Neuromancer coined the phrase "cyberspace" and "enabled researchers in virtual reality to recognize and organize themselves as a community (Stone)"
One has to acknowledge the appeal to fantasy that current speculation abount virtual reality and Cyberspace makes and the discrepancies between what is possible today and what one imagines. I myself am caught up in this desiring relation with its frustrations.
Roseanne Alluquere Stone studies virtual space as an apparatus for the production of community and as an apparatus for the production of the body, where "meeting face to face" occurs in a transformed sense of both meeting and face. see prosthesis