This essay will pose and seek to answer the following question: If, as Swami Vivekananda claims, the four yogas are independent and equally effective paths to God-realization and liberation from the cycle of rebirth, then what must reality be like? What ontology is implied by the claim that the four yogas are all equally effective paths to the supreme goal of religious life? What metaphysical conditions would enable this pluralistic assertion to be true? Swami Vivekananda’s worldview is frequently identified with (...) Advaita Vedānta. We shall see that Vivekananda’s teaching is certainly Advaitic in what could be called a broad sense. As Anantanand Rambachan and others, however, have pointed out, it would be incorrect to identify Swami Vivekananda’s teachings in any rigid or dogmatic sense with the classical Advaita Vedānta of Śaṅkara; this is because Vivekananda’s teaching departs from that of Śaṅkara in some significant ways, not least in his assertion of the independent salvific efficacy of the four yogas. This essay will argue that Swami Vivekananda’s pluralism, based on the concept of the four yogas, is far more akin to the deep religious pluralism that is advocated by contemporary philosophers of religion in the Whiteheadian tradition of process thought like David Ray Griffin and John Cobb, the classical Jain doctrines of relativity (anekāntavāda, nayavāda, and syādvāda), and, most especially, the Vijñāna Vedānta of Vivekananda’s guru, Sri Ramakrishna, than any of these approaches is to the Advaita Vedānta of Śaṅkara. Advaita Vedānta, in Vivekananda’s pluralistic worldview, becomes one valid conceptual matrix among many that bear the ability to support an efficacious path to liberation. This essay is intended not as an historical reconstruction of Vivekananda’s thought, so much as a constructive philosophical contribution to the ongoing scholarly conversations about both religious (and, more broadly, worldview) pluralism and the religious and philosophical legacies of both Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. The former conversation has arrived at something of an impasse (as recounted by Kenneth Rose), while the latter conversation has recently been revived, thanks to the work of Swami Medhananda (formerly Ayon Maharaj) and Arpita Mitra. (shrink)

Intersexuality, particularly in the global South, remains an under‐researched field of study. In my in‐progress doctoral research project, I explore the cultural, social, and medical discourses that influence how key stakeholders such as healthcare providers make decisions about the sex and gender assignment of the intersex child in India. In this paper I interrogate some of these ideas around gender assignment of intersex people in India, paying particular attention to the context of son preference. I am interested in exploring how (...) decisions of gender assignment by medical professionals are guided by ideas of son preference. Focusing on four qualitative, semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews across two cities with medical doctors from different specializations, this paper is a preliminary attempt to examine some of the factors that guide medical professionals in making decisions about gender assignment of intersex children and explore the dynamics of the decision‐making process. Specifically, I explore the factors that inform doctors’ decision‐making and locate these decision‐making processes within the broader socio‐cultural context of India. (shrink)

vol. 1. Vairāgya-prakaraṇa, Mumukṣu-prakaraṇa, Utpatti-prakaraṇa -- vol. 2. Sthiti-prakaraṇa, Upadeśa-prakaraṇa -- vol. 3. Nirvāṇa-prakaraṇa (pūrvārdha) -- vol. 4. Nirvāṇa prakaraṇa (utarārdha).

Cet article s’attaque au manque d’informations sur les nombreux conflits de distribution écologique (EDC) provoqués par l’extractivisme minier en Inde au cours de ces dernières années. Le minerai de fer est le métal le plus extrait en Inde et, par conséquent, les conflits liés à cette activité sont importants. Nous analysons ici neuf conflits majeurs surgis dans différents états de l’Inde. Dans l’analyse de ces cas, nous mettons l’accent que les conséquences de l’extractivisme prédateur dans le secteur de l’exploitation des (...) minerais, ainsi que leurs impacts environnementaux, sociaux et culturels sur les régions minières « périphériques » de l’Inde. (shrink)

Aren Z. Aizura's Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment is one of the best nonfiction books I have read recently. I was interested in Aizura's work because of the several ways in which this book's subjects resonated with my reflections on gender nonconforming subjects, gender reassignment, and the medical-industrial complex with a focus on interrogating the West/non-West binary. It focuses on trans and gender nonconforming people, issues of mobility, and access to various technologies for bodily modification. This book, divided (...) in two parts, will be of interest to a variety of readers, especially scholars doing feminist studies, queer theory, feminist science and technology... (shrink)

Reproductive technologies are increasingly used not just to detect the presence of fetal “abnormalities” but also to “correct” or eliminate them before birth. This is done with the aim to enable the birth of “healthy” and “normal” children who can contribute better to the nation’s productivity. Although these processes are common to most women, the situation is further aggravated for surrogates within developing country contexts, who already work in precarious conditions and occupy the lower end of the hierarchy within the (...) surrogacy arrangement. Highlighting the Indian surrogacy context, I discuss and analyze some of these biopolitical challenges and complexities. (shrink)

Acupuncture, like many alternative health care modalities, allows for and encourages a bodily experience of transformation. Clients (as well as practitioners) often experience a new body in the making. Within the context of ethnographic work focusing on the emergent bodies of acupuncturists and their clients, this paper focuses on the third, and perpetually more hidden, member of this ethnographic triad: the anthropologist. How do anthropologists position themselves in relation to alternative health care? Where is the anthropologists' body in relation to (...) an alternative health modality like acupuncture? Certainly fieldwork is never solely a discursive venture. Where are our bodies when we are doing fieldwork? (shrink)

The present globalized era is a rapid changing era. To prove themselves, all are running, but running after what nobody knows. But in the event of proving they have to compromise with two values, that is, one is in personal value and other is work value. It is very difficult to keep a balance between the two. The present study tried to find out the same with a sample size of 262 executives from a public sector enterprise of India including (...) male & female and salaried & non salaried spouse. The data collected from the above sample through a tool with the objectives of finding out the difference of value profile between general life and work life of executives and prioritization of each value life. Result shows that there is no significant difference between two life values in the above organization. As far as gender differentiation is concerned female attach more value to general life value than work life value in comparison to the male executives. All the groups gave more importance to work value than general value. But in both the values they prioritize ‘meaningfulness’ component as an important one. So it can be inferred that executives are able to strike a balance between both the value system in work set up or the organization is giving such a culture where general life values are being taken care of properly. (shrink)

Bioethics has changed considerably over the last few years. Increased global interaction, through the off-shoring of clinical trials, cross-border surrogacy, organ trafficking, and medical tourism, among others practices, has brought additional considerations to a discipline that has been, until recently, relatively contained within national borders. We aim to contribute to the discourse on exploitation and vulnerability in a way that reflects such global changes. We will explore the link between vulnerability and exploitation, and argue that exploitation can be understood as (...) taking advantage of vulnerabilities, provided we recognize that vulnerabilities are often embedded within existing structural injustices. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 3, Page 233-234, March 2022.

The body in-pain has regularly been relegated to "the dark side"of Western biomedicine, academic research, and even everyday life. Following Starhawk's aptly titled resuscitation of "the dark"as a fertile source of spiritual transformation (Dreaming the Dark, 1982), this essay examines the ways in which intractable pain can open up the body to "a new body in the making" —one that engages with pain kinesthetically as well as discursively. This essay explores three ethnographic cases emerging from three different American fieldvvork sites. (...) An Internet mailing list called WITSENDO constitutes the first case; through often daily participation in this electronic mailing list, women suffering from endometriosis co-create a virtual community that strikingly mitigates their experiences of chronicand intense pain. The shift in how long-term clients of acupuncture care regard needling is the locus of the second case. Acupuncture treatments in American clinical settings often negotiate an American cultural assumption that needles are painful; this second case documents what happens to patients' "fear" of needles and experiences of pain after regular acupuncture treatments. The third case focuses on adepth interview with an American doula who provides labor support for women primarily in hospital settings, this interview explores the conditions under which American women in labor experience pain and how alternative birth professionals define and conceive of pain during childbirth.These three ethnographic cases highlight the cultural construction of pain by delving into the ways that pain sufferers and health care practitioners engage with the body-in-pain. Such engagements occur in the realm of language - both discursive and kinesthetic language. (shrink)

Gandhi’s writings on the issue of Caturvarṇa, despite their apparent lacunas, dogmatic tones and seeming inconsistencies, are available to a convincing reconstruction. With this purpose in view, the first section of this paper will attempt to give an anti-foundational reading of Caturvarṇa—where varṇa is seen to be based neither on the different proportions of the three guṇas (sattva, rajas and tamas), nor on a system of hereditary professions, but as abstract dimensions that are not mutually exclusive—and at best serves to (...) give an orientation to our cognition and actions. This reading, while borrowing heavily from Shri Aurobindo’s reading of Caturvarṇa, will seek to give it a more neutral and expansive direction, shorn of all associated suggestions of intransigence and empirical contingencies, in order to effect the best possible synthesis with Gandhi. The second section of this paper will concentrate on appropriate portions of Gandhi’s commentary on Gῑtā, trying to track down Gandhi’s reservations against any psychological determinism with respect to varṇa. His direct but scattered observations on varṇa and caste will be addressed in the last section—to see how far our neutral reading of Caturvarṇa can be responsibly reconciled with his distinction between varṇa and caste—indicating a way to dissolve the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate on varṇabheda and jātibheda. Overall, this paper attempts a paradigmatic reconstruction of Gandhian Caturvarṇa in the light of his approach to the notion of niṣkāma karma. (shrink)

Despite the growing importance of ‘social value’ as a central feature of research ethics, the term remains both conceptually vague and to a certain extent operationally rigid. And yet, perhaps because the rhetorical appeal of social value appears immediate and self-evident, the concept has not been put to rigorous investigation in terms of its definition, strength, function, and scope. In this article, we discuss how the anthropological concept of liminality can illuminate social value and differentiate and reconfigure its variegated approaches. (...) Employing liminality as a heuristic encourages a reassessment of how we understand the mobilization of ‘social value’ in bioethics. We argue that social value as seen through the lens of liminality can provide greater clarity of its function and scope for health research. Building on calls to understand social value as a dynamic, rather than a static, concept, we emphasize the need to appraise social value iteratively throughout the entire research as something that transforms over multiple times and across multiple spaces occupied by a range of actors. (shrink)

In this paper, we take up the call to further examine structural injustice in health, and racial inequalities in particular. We examine the many facets of racism: structural, interpersonal and institutional as they appeared in the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, and emphasize the relevance of their systemic character. We suggest that such inequalities were entirely foreseeable, for their causal mechanisms are deeply ingrained in our social structures. It is by recognizing the conventional, un-extraordinary nature of racism within social systems (...) that we can begin to address socially mediated health inequalities. (shrink)

The last 20 years have seen a staggering growth in the practice of off-shoring clinical research to low-and middle-income countries (LICs and MICs), a growth that has been matched by the neoliberal policies adopted by host countries towards attracting trials to their shores. A recurring concern in this context is the charge of exploitation, linked to various aspects of off-shoring. In this paper, I examine Alan Wertheimer's approach and offer an alternative view of understanding exploitation in this context. I will (...) suggest that the justification for the enterprise of research is largely dependent on its integration within a health system from which participants regularly benefit and I argue that an attention to a principle of reciprocity will enable us to better recognize and address exploitation in international research. (shrink)

BackgroundDuring a commercial surrogacy arrangement, the event of embryo transfer can be seen as the formal starting point of the arrangement. However, it is common for surrogates to undergo a failed attempt at pregnancy conception or missed conception after an embryo transfer. This paper attempts to argue that such failed attempts can be understood as a loss. It aims to reconstruct the experiences of loss and grief of the surrogates and the intended parents as a consequence of their collective failure (...) to conceive a surrogate pregnancy.MethodsDrawing on a qualitative study conducted over a period of eight months between 2014 and 2015 at two fertility clinics in Delhi and two in Kolkata, India, this paper examines the experiences of the surrogates and the intended parents when faced with missed conceptions or failed conceptions during a surrogacy arrangement.ResultsWe argue that while the surrogate grieves the non-arrival of a ‘good news’ as an uncertain loss, the intended parents experience yet another, failure in addition to the losses they might have incurred during their previous fertility treatments. The body of the surrogate becomes a site of ‘a lost opportunity’. The surrogate embodies a loss in her quest to achieve social mobility and the intended parents experience a disembodied pregnancy loss. This very emotional experience stands in stark contrast to the conceptualisation of such failed attempts as non-events within the discourse of the surrogacy industry. The experience of loss of the intended parents is recognised but their grief is given no space. We argue that such ambiguity around the nature of losses resulting out of a missed or failed conception during surrogacy is an outcome of lack of interpersonal relationship between the surrogate and the intended parents.ConclusionsSince commercial surrogacy is a relational process, the only way in which the experiences of losses and failures of the actors at the preconception stage can be better addressed is through developing close sharing and understanding between each other through an ethics of care. Therefore, to nurture caring relationships, surrogacy needs to be understood as a moral commitment by –the surrogates and intended parents. To enable such a commitment, there is a need to reconsider the pre-defined and legally regulated professional duty of the doctors, agents and agencies. It cannot be a one-sided commitment, but has to have elements of mutuality. (shrink)

Mitochondrial shape change, brought about by molecules that promote either fission or fusion between individual mitochondria, has been documented in several model systems. However, the deeper significance of mitochondrial shape change has only recently begun to emerge: among others, it appears to play a role in the regulation of cell proliferation. Here, I review the emerging interplay between mitochondrial fission‐fusion components with cell cycle regulatory machineries and how that may impact cell differentiation. Regulation of mitochondrial shape may modulate mitochondrial metabolism (...) and/or energetics to promote crosstalk between signaling components and the cell cycle machinery. Focused research in this area will reveal the exact role of mitochondria in development and disease, specifically in stem cell regulation and tumorigenesis. Such research may also reveal whether and how the endosymbiotic event that gave rise to the mitochondrion was crucial for the evolution of cell cycle regulatory mechanisms in eukaryotes that are absent in prokaryotes. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

The welfare state, once seen as the best institutional response to people in need, has steadily come under pressure, as much from shrinking state capacities as from neo-liberal advocates of individual responsibility. Still, despite decline of the post-war consensus on the efficacy of the welfare state, social ‘vulnerability’ still remains the key focus of public policy. However, though much in use in contemporary political discourse, the logical and practical implications of social vulnerability remain unclear. Its essential subjectivity – it is (...) the ‘feeling of vulnerability’ which makes one vulnerable – turns the concept into a catch-all variable, impeding rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis. I respond to this problem with a ‘vulnerability-responsibility’, model. Its parameters include a ‘responsive’ state, an active civil society and a participatory political environment, bolstered by the assertion of agency of the vulnerable. With India as an empirical exemplar, the essay shows how ‘nested’ vulnerability – a community of pro-active citizens in need of urgent and vital assistance - in the backdrop of a responsive state and competitive, robust and resilient political participation, can generate a sustainable, context-relevant process to cope with the problem of social vulnerability. The model, currently aimed at vulnerable citizens in a democratic state, has the potential of being extended to non-democracies as well as vulnerable non-citizens into its domain. (shrink)

Islam gives legal precedence to purity of lineage and known parenthood of all children. In Islam treatment to infertility using IVF is permitted within validity of marriage contract with no genes mixing. The paper shows that the Qur’ān, the word of Allah, and science, the deeds of Allah are not in major conflicts in defining the start of human life. The Holy Qur’ān provides an elegant description of origin, developmental stages of intra-uterine life. The Hadith explains two positions one that (...) believes human embryo get ensouled at conception and the other after 40 days of conception. The paper aims to find that Islam confers moral respect to human embryo, but it also clarifies the absence of full human rights to a developing foetus. In Islam, human embryonic use is probably permissible for therapeutic and reproductive purpose keeping intact the principles of Shari’ah. (shrink)

I examine here Theory and Scholarship (taken to be formalized social scientific frameworks that seek to map out the real world and social actions in an objective fashion) via an autoethnographic lens. Chiefly, I ask how autoethnography as a research method reconfigures them: how may we extend knowledge using autoethnography? While much critique has centered on the "doing" (dispassionately?) versus "being" (going native?) of autoethnography, I argue that such a dichotomy is inherently false. Instead, doing is located within the ethnographer's (...) very being, so that a closer look at the autoethnographic research process is required, from conception to implementation to introspection. I attempt such a processual analysis here: drawing on an earlier social scientific project, I relate the intellectual and social process whereby it was translated into an autoethnography. Using a performative lens to illustrate the dialectical mode of doing and being in the research process, I intersperse portions of personal narrative with academic writing, to enable a disjunctural appreciation of the various layers of interpretation. While the epistemic framework I hold to here is indeed a poststructural one, privileging fragmentation and social situatedness, it also emphasizes continuity and interconnections in the research process. (shrink)

This book is the first to bring together an interdisciplinary collection of essays on surrogacy and egg donation from three socially, legally and culturally distinct countries - India, Israel and Germany. It presents contributions from experts in the field of social and cultural sciences, bioethics, law as well as psychology and provides critical-reflective comparative analysis of the socio-ethical factors shaping surrogacy and egg donation practices across these three countries. This book highlights the importance of a comparative perspective to ‘make sense’ (...) of controversies and transitions in this highly contested area of artificial reproductive technologies. It demonstrates how local developments cannot be isolated from global events and vice versa. Therefore, this volume can be used as a standard reference for anyone seeking to understand surrogacy and egg donation from a macro-perspective in the next decade. (shrink)

Pleiotropically acting eukaryotic corepressors such as retinoblastoma and SIN3 have been found to physically interact with many widely expressed “housekeeping” genes. Evidence suggests that their roles at these loci are not to provide binary on/off switches, as is observed at many highly cell‐type specific genes, but rather to serve as governors, directly modulating expression within certain bounds, while not shutting down gene expression. This sort of regulation is challenging to study, as the differential expression levels can be small. We hypothesize (...) that depending on context, corepressors mediate “soft repression,” attenuating expression in a less dramatic but physiologically appropriate manner. Emerging data indicate that such regulation is a pervasive characteristic of most eukaryotic systems, and may reflect the mechanistic differences between repressor action at promoter and enhancer locations. Soft repression may represent an essential component of the cybernetic systems underlying metabolic adaptations, enabling modest but critical adjustments on a continual basis. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper was to determine whether the individual attributes of locus of control, gender, major in college and years of job experience affect the acceptability of certain workplace behaviors. A total of 198 college students of a mid-sized southeastern university formed the sample for this study. Locus of control, gender and years of job experience were found to have some affect on whether an individual considered a certain behavior acceptable or unacceptable.

In her paper titled “The End of Personhood,” Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) takes a swipe at the functionalist account of personhood. The problem with the functionalist view of personhood is that...

In this commentary, we take up Yearby’s call for racism-sensitive research and apply this to the discourse regarding race and diversity in COVID vaccine research. We consider whether efforts...

. Fuzzy systems and artificial neural networks, as important components of soft-computation, can be applied together to model uncertainty. A composite block of the fuzzy system and the ANN shares a mutually beneficial association resulting in enhanced performance with smaller networks. It makes them suitable for application with time-varying multi-input multi-output channel modeling enabling such a system to track minute variations in propagation conditions. Here we propose a fuzzy neural system using a fuzzy time delay fully recurrent neural network that (...) has the capability to tackle time-varying inputs in fuzzified form and is used to model MIMO channels. The inference engine is constituted by novel FTDFRNN blocks which determine the decision boundaries and tracks in-phase and quadrature components of input signals encompassing stochastic behavior of the MIMO channel. The system shows significant improvement in performance compared to statistical and ANN approaches in terms of faster processing time, lower bit error rate margins and better precision while carrying out symbol recovery of transmitted data through severely faded MIMO channels. (shrink)

The best evidence in favour of a claim to knowledge warranties not the possibility of our not being wrong, so says the sceptic. Whatever grounds a putative knower has for some claim, always there exists a gap between the grounds and the claim. Anti-sceptical stands take the form of attempts either to bridge or close the gap. The Cartesian approach for bridging up the gap consists in specifying a guarantee for the subjective ground of beliefs that would secure them from (...) sceptical attacks and elevate them to the status of knowledge. The guarantee is to be sought in the goodness of a deity, which by virtue of its sheer goodness will ensure our not being led into deception in matters of evidences for knowledge-claims, provided our epistemic endowments are used responsibly. Some not satisfied with the Cartesian tradition sought the guarantee elsewhere—in some basic self-justifying and self-evident beliefs providing foundation to our system of beliefs, which conjoined with the evidences for our claims to knowledge make such claims immune to sceptical attacks. (shrink)

Companies operating and located in emerging economy nations routinely couch their corporate social responsibility (CSR) work in nation-building terms. In this article, I focus on the Indian context and critically examine mainstream CSR discourse from the perspective of the culture-centered approach (CCA). Accordingly, five main themes of CSR stand out: nation-building facade, underlying neoliberal logics, CSR as voluntary, CSR as synergetic, and a clear urban bias. Next, I outline a CCA-inspired CSR framework that allows corporate responsibility to be re-claimed and (...) re-framed by subaltern communities of interest. I identify such resistive openings via interrogations of culture (I focus on oft-cited Gandhian ethics here), structure (State policy, organizational strategy, and global/local flows), and agency (subaltern reframing of institutional responsibility, engagement with alternative modes of agency, and deconstructive vigilance). (shrink)

Analysis of the philosophy of Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950, in the context of the contemporary sociopolitical environment.

India is a rising power in the multipolar world. This book showcases India's endogenous political ideas and strategic thinking, both of which are the key resources that underpin and drive this rise. Kautilya's Arthashastra is a major source of these ideas. It is a premodern treatise on statecraft and a foundational text of political science. So far, political science and international relations theory have largely ignored Kautilya, or, at best, labelled him merely as the 'Indian Machiavelli'. Such a characterisation vastly (...) undervalues the riches and depth of the contributions of Kautilya - a contemporary of Aristotle - whose contributions can be compared more appropriately to those of Artistotle's politics. Kautilya's contributions are recognised by such masters of western political theory as Max Weber and Hans J. Morgenthau. But in South Asia, Kautilya has remained adrift of the academic mainstream and has been given little prominence in public life, both intellectually and politically. Despite such scholarly negligence, everyday life in India - in terms of the institutions and process that constitute it - has remained deeply grounded in the political heritage of pre-modern India, succinctly codified in Kautilya's Arthashastra. These themes are explored in this book through such bridge concepts as the 'modernity of tradition' and the 're-use of the past' in tackling contemporary political problems. These concepts are the key factors that explain the resilience and stability of India's hybrid political institutions and democratic system. 'Kautilya's Arthashastra: an Intellectual portrait - Classical Roots of Modern Politics in India' is an indispensable key to understanding contemporary India and a major contribution to South Asian area studies, comparative politics and global political theory. (shrink)

This paper investigates the dilemma that has been projected upon Indian female dancers’ bodies by contemporary Indian audiences when female desire occupies the centrality of a performance and projects the female body as sexual, articulate and independent of the discipline and propriety of classicism. Locating this dilemma in the nationalist construction of Indian womanhood and femininity as ‘chaste’, this paper adopts Victor Turner's notions of liminal and liminoid phenomenon and Brechtian defamiliarization technique as a feminist strategy to construct a framework (...) within which the contemporary Indian dancer can reclaim her sexuality in performance. To investigate the complex nationalist trope of chaste Indian womanhood, and to analyse the subversion of this trope by placing agency on the female body as sexual, I locate my argument in the discussion of The Silk Route: Memory of a Journey by Kinaetma Theatre, UK, which was performed in Kolkata in August 2004. (shrink)

We emphasize that the pressure related work appearing in a general relativistic first law of thermodynamics should involve proper volume element rather than coordinate volume element. This point is highlighted by considering both local energy momentum conservation equation as well as particle number conservation equation. It is also emphasized that we are considering here a non-singular fluid governed by purely classical general relativity. Therefore, we are not considering here any semi-classical or quantum gravity which apparently suggests thermodynamical properties even for (...) a (singular) black hole. Having made such a clarification, we formulate a global first law of thermodynamics for an adiabatically evolving spherical perfect fluid. It may be verified that such a global first law of thermodynamics, for a non-singular fluid, has not been formulated earlier. (shrink)

The increasing availability and popularity of ways to capture personal memories using technologies such as digital cameras is beginning to alter the way in which personal memory images are produced, retained and circulated. Unlike the analog technologies, it is now possible to create an immediately available presence on the Internet. When examined from the perspective of voice, this phenomenon expands the potential of creating personal history narratives that could be collated together to produce a non‐institutional history of an era. This (...) paper explores the ways in which the digital technologies can facilitate the production of such histories and what the technologies could do the sense of presence of an individual in the realm of the virtual. (shrink)