Illumination and Construal: Light as Enabler and Constrainer of Possibility: 9 Technological Light: Digital, Virtual, and Networked Construal

If quantum theory fractured light into indeterminate possibility, the technological age harnessed it as the very medium of symbolic extension. Fibre optics, lasers, LEDs, and screens — all enlist light not just as illumination but as conduit, storage, and transformation of information. Here, light becomes the infrastructural substrate of global networks and digital worlds.

The genealogy shifts: light ceases to be merely an object of study or metaphor of thought. It is engineered into the core of symbolic life. Photons carry voices across oceans, pulses of light encode financial markets, luminous pixels generate virtual environments in which we act, imagine, and construe reality anew.

Three dimensions of construal emerge:

• Computational light: laser-based storage, optical circuits, and display technologies treat light as programmable medium. Possibility is no longer only observed but designed.

• Virtual light: the screen as field of construal — a luminous surface where images, narratives, and symbols coalesce into immersive worlds. Here, the boundary between actual and possible becomes porous.

• Networked light: fibre-optic cables bind the planet into a single relational field, where construal is distributed, scaled, and accelerated by the speed of photons.

The symbolic consequence is profound: imagination is no longer constrained to the mind or the page. It becomes infrastructural. Whole domains of possibility are generated through luminous technologies that extend collective construal beyond physical presence.

If myth cast light as divine, and physics revealed it as field, digital modernity renders it infrastructural — the hidden but omnipresent medium of relational life. In this way, technological light is not only the carrier of information but the enabler of new symbolic orders: cyberspace, virtuality, and the digital cosmos itself.

Light is thus both the oldest cosmological metaphor and the most contemporary technical substrate. The genealogy converges here: mythic, scientific, and technological dimensions interweave in a single luminous horizon.