Jul 07 2009
Modern Media
I thought I would share a paper I recently wrote about modern media and its effects on society before I get into some video tips here it is
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Life, Through the Prism of a Cartographer.
“All the World’s a Stage,” As You like It, William Shakespeare
sim·u·la·crum an insubstantial form or semblance of something / Webster’s Dictionary
Jean Beaudrillard explains his theory of life as a simulacrum by using the metaphor of a cartographer creating a map of a great realm. A map so detailed and accurate that they only way to display it is to lay it over the land it represents. Eventually people forget the original land and accept the map as the true artifact. Recently I was reading a series of book which had a character who was a private eye. The private eye in question lived and worked in New York City. I was curious to see his surrounding to get a better (more virtual) sense of the books. I googled the location of his home and not only was I able to see the area from above, I was able to zoom in and virtually walk the streets in a 360 degree view. Recently a criminal named Tom Berge used Google Earth to select certain homes in England to burgle. If this is not what Baudrillard conceived it is certainly only a generation or two from his ideal. There has been much debate about Baudrillard’s vision but the question to be posed in this time is not whether we are moving into a society which has become a simulacrum but instead how soon shall the envisioned simulacrum replace reality. But then again Baudrillard felt that we had always lived in the simulacrum society and looking at the quote from Shakespeare’s As You like It and back even further to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave the concept lived long before technology. In those periods the belief is that people were feigning an existence to suit there own means but they were still moving in a carnal world.
Baudrillard illuminates the difference between simulation and feigning with the example of persons who claims to be ill. A feigner will claim his illness and perhaps lie in bed but one who simulates actually tries to feel the illness psychosomatically. The simulation consumes the reality to a point where the lines are blurred, a vanishing point created until a simulacrum is created which leaves the original reality void. What separates Baudrillard from Plato or Shakespeare is that he looks at a post carnal world a world where the concept of the flesh is forfeited for a cerebral model of society or in more contemporary terms a virtual society. This makes the work of David Cronenberg and most notably his Character in the film Videodrome, Brian O’Blivion closer to the tone of Baudrillard. Ironically though Baudrillard has passed on his lectures live on much like that of Brian Oblivion, not on Videodrome but its forerunner, YouTube. Though there have been countless warnings of the ills that may bring and if the average person were polled they would swear an oath to the concept that a world which lives in the technological is flawed and doomed, we seem to be on a collision course with that reality. William Gibson and Phillip K. Dick have outlined in great detail in there books these future technological societies but much of the work is dismissed as fiction and not given the weight of Plato, Shakespeare, or Baudrillard but the are prescient just the same. Where science fiction has come up short is that they believed that the vanishing point of carnal society is when robots would supersede humans in their construction. The transference seems to happen in a world where robots or androids have yet to reach the levels of sophistication envisioned by Dick or Gibson. Robots, though not flesh are still tactile entities which live in physical space. It seems that the pattern is going beyond tactile restrictions and that the simulation of life is thrown in the ether know as the internet. So if we look at Baudrillard’s map as an outline of one’s life we can start to look at the basis of my argument.
In 1998 Jim Carey starred in a film called The Truman Show. The film documented the life of Truman Burbank who was chosen to unknowingly to have a synthesized life from birth to adulthood so that viewers could tune in and see how he would cope with his day to day existence. The concept was born out of the very early days of reality television where the though of voyeuristically watching other peoples live became big business. At the time the Idea of a show such as the Truman show seemed plausible but far fetched. The cost and logistics of creating a synthesized world just to suit the needs an entertainment and the ethics of manipulating a person’s life.
Fast forward ten years into the future, I open up my facebook account to be greeted by fetus images –yes, fetus! Friend’s family and acquaintances all displaying their unborn children in their media albums and many of them using them as their avatars and profile images. Some people decide not to show their sonogram images of their unborn but instead use another tact the take the profile shot of the mother displaying her stomach in sequential stages of her pregnancy until the day that the very first image of the newborn is placed and the new profile image for all to coo and ooh and ahhh.
What we are seeing is a version of the Truman Show in a macro sense. Not one life but thousands of lives are being recorded and broadcast then tracked and commented on from conception. Thousands if not millions of people are becoming media entities before they even see the light of day. Though this is relatively new it is safe to say that these parents will be annotating the early lives of their children up until the children can create a site of their own and take over media ownership of their virtual existence or even run a parallel existence where you will see their parents perception of their life, then their own. The children of these children born in the age of Social Websites will be able to look back and see and entire track of their parents and grandparents lives from pre-birth to perhaps death. Here is where Baudrillard’s map comes into play. Essentially by the use of facebook Twitter and perhaps future forms of social networking a living growing map of a person’s existence is created and since it begins pre-birth it supersedes even the conscience memory of the subject it represents. So is the virtual map the definitive version of the subject’s life or is their own recollection the true tome. What is also interesting is that they will track their family and friends responses to their achievements and milestones. For instance if an uncle says, “I remember you when you were a baby!” That person can look and verify that their uncle once commented 30years ago that they “looked cute” in an image their parents posted. This almost nullifies the need for memory because all of the emotion and discussion of events will be recorded in ones life. Baudrillard also looks at life as a series of spectacles that people encounter what we now have is a platform for the sharing of these spectacles, births, deaths, birth days, anniversaries, trips all quoted and annotated with pictures. The map once again is truer than recollection or as Phillip K. Dick wrote, “More human than human.”
Another question to pose is does this in a sense create a virtual immortality. In Videodrome the character Brian Oblivion is dead but lives on in a collection of video tapes that he makes prior to his death. Will we reach a point where inputting all of our thoughts, emotions, blogs, twits that eventually we can create a randomizer that when asked would spit out a possible facsimile of what it thinks we would say or do in any given situation. Oblivion in the film also is quoted saying that “Oblivion is not the name I was born with, it is my television name. One day we will all have special names.” Did Cronenberg foresee the day of avatars and screen names. At the time of Videodrome, screen names had already been implemented in early internet applications such as BBS sites which began in 1972. Facebook, which is currently the most popular of social websites currently allows users to have only there true names as screen names but shortly, perhaps even by the time this is posted will be changing to allow screen names so that John Smith may now become, Mr. Creepy, or Jane Doe can become Choirgirl 17. The special names that Cronenberg foresaw have arrived. I have been amazed how many times in the last few years I have gone to professional conventions and lectures and heard people refer to each other by their screen names.
The largest unanswered question is to what effect will have this very first generation of “Truman Babies” cause us to change our perception of life? What will a person who has been media integrated since conception perceive as reality think of the world? Will they ever know of the kingdom that lay beneath the map which was created for them? Will they care? The other aspect to consider is who will care for them. If the tracking of life becomes the norm it lives outside the Truman concept in that Truman was a national sensation and the entire country watched him grow up in huge numbers. Every one of his accomplishments resonated with the society he belonged to as a whole. But if we are creating thousands if not millions of Truman babies daily than the effect does not resonate and the concept of a life tracked becomes mundane. Will we see a standardization of the life born on line? Will Cliché be established? Will a new social networking site be created to deal exclusively with pre-birth through adolescent children?
There is another side the coin as well, death. Recently I friend of mine died and his wife memorialized his Facebook page. This posed and interesting dilemma for me because the question came up over what is the proper protocol in posting bereavement on a person’s page? We have established how to share celebrations but grief is an entirely different politic. Along with birth will a site try to establish the proper way to standardize death?
Another question posed is how to track all this information? Will Google or some other entity establish a way to archive and track all of these posts which has been created over the extent of a life? How, in fact will the Truman Babies be able to track them? There is still a great deal of protocols and tools to be established to harness the information of these social networks on a case by case basis.
The 1999 film, The Matrix is said to be based on many of Baudrillard’s concepts in it the character of Neo which is a user/special name for John Anderson finds that he has been living in an alternate reality world and hopes to break free and warn the rest of society of its situation. The movie was released prior to the conception of many of the social networking institutions and along with the Beaudrillardian concepts. Ironically the film was a warning about being consumed by a virtual existence but seemed to have exacerbated the problem. The virtual world struck as a romantic notion to many of the youth who watched it and for them technology obliged their appetite.
So is it possible to get off the speeding technological train? Are we as a global society doomed to crash? It is too early to tell but as the Truman Babies grow up it will be their ability to understand the world and how they respond to the virtual identities created for them in utero that will decide what the next great evolution in society will be. And Whether or not they will be known only by their special names.
Prospero:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a track behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158