Global Village redux
With social media, smartphones, and all the other virtual connections we have with one another in the 21st century, most of us are perhaps once more persistently social (though in a new way), and at least in some important senses connected in ways we weren't during the heyday of manufactured broadcast media. The barriers of privacy and interiority we invented while reading books and watching TV are all being broken down again by network technology, and the isolation of sitting on our couches passively watching the world be recreated for us as an illusion on TV is also less and less our experience. Who's not texting during their Netflix binges? Some people barely watch TV or even streaming services anymore, finding the grass roots media generated on YouTube and TikTok to be much more interesting and sometimes deeper, and often much more real as well (that's my own experience). The Internet and all the related forms of digital technology bring with them a combination of immediacy and interconnectedness that promise a future in which we are "all in this thing together," all the time, a transparency and authenticity that have been impossible since before the advent of print literacy.
Or so one poster boy version of the final triumph of McLuhan's Global Village would have us believe. And I really like this idea. But now take a breath, have a pee, look through your phone alerts (and then put it away), and prepare for one last look at the relationship between media and reality: hyperreality. This is going to be a big idea in this course. Pay attention.
Increased hyperreality is certainly a bi-product of video and television; is it also now an aspect of our constant use of social media? I tend to think it is.
Before we go there, it might be valuable to clarify how I am using certain terms. I've used "virtual" and "vicarious" already without really going into what I mean by them. Here are some concepts to keep in mind as you explore the idea of hyperreality.
IN REAL LIFE (IRL)
Physically embodied and happening for real, not represented in media.
MEDIATED
Conveyed to you via media (writing, images, video, recordings, virtual reality etc) rather than directly through embodied lived experience.
FICTIONAL MEDIA
Made up, didn't really happen or doesn't exist IRL. Generally acknowledged to be fictional by both producer and consumer.
FAKE NEWS
Something that isn't true or doesn't exist, but which has been simulated or reported as real to deceive people. Lies.
VICARIOUS
Experienced by proxy through imaginative identification with someone else, real or fictional, rather than directly. You can experience infatuation vicariously by watching a movie about someone who is infatuated, for instance. You can also attempt to have experiences or emotions through other real people, such as when parents try to realize their own unsatisfied dreams through shaping their children's lives. Finally, one can get some kind of vicarious satisfaction from identifying with "real" people as represented via media, such as an influencer. Vicarious reality is an imaginative form of empathy and projection; it is low-risk and low-cost, though some would say it is also a poor replacement for real experiences of one's own. The ease with which most people can gain at least some satisfaction from vicarious, mediated, mostly fictional experience seems to be at the heart of why we are so often content to consume media instead of having direct experiences ourselves.
VIRTUAL
Simulated. Experienced via media, especially electronic media, whether it is attempting to simulate lived perception (as in an explosion in a movie) or simulating social interaction that used to be embodied (as in discussion forums, VR chat rooms, etc).
Okay, here we go.