The Practical Use of Other Realities: Taking Berger and Luckmann into the Wild

Abstract

The sociology of knowledge that followed The Social Construction of Reality shifted from the study of rarified ideas to practical activity, focusing on the stabilization of a sense of shared reality. The opposite side of this shift in emphasis has received much less attention – activities that place reality into a state of play and, in so doing, call attention to its ephemerality. I discuss three empirical areas where the practical use of other realities is central to the sociology of knowledge. First, I document cases in which skilled practitioners, such as airline pilots, safety engineers, and athletes, use simulation to prepare for events that are understood as highly uncertain and risky. Next, I describe how other realities are mobilized epistemologically, such as through experimentation in technoscience and experimentalism in unrealized or ‘unbuilt’ art and architecture. Finally, I consider autotelic and transcendent social experiences through fantasy and technological mediations like augmented realities.