Global Village or Desert of the Real?
- The Global Village
- What is the it we are with?
- The society of the spectacle
- Global village redux
- "Welcome to the desert of the real"
- DId you see what Sheldon did last night?
- Hyperreality and virtual reality
Recommended Readings/Viewings
Key concepts, people, etc
- Marshall McLuhan: famous Canadian media theorist
"First we shape our tools ..."; Global village, "With it," "Tribal drums"
- Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
Hyperreality is the recognition that the typical person's "reality" is a mix of lived experience and media, and that the media is a confusing mix of images: real, fictional, edited, packaged. Much of what we treat as real is actually a mediated simulation, and we start to try to recreate the images we see, even though they are often not true to lived experience
- Guy Debord and The society of the spectacle
The society of the Spectacle phrase draws attention to the way modern people in developed countries have gradually become passive spectators of media (eg watching tv, scrolling through TikTok) rather than doing things themselves in the real world
- Mobile privatization
The irony that the phone and the Internet - communication tools - are often used by individuals to disconnect from each other, for instance listening to earbuds in class or at the dinner table
- Parasocial
A term for one-way imaginary "social" connections with influencers or fictional characters through media, as when someone "hangs out" with the characters in an
episode of Friends, or "spends time with" a cottagecore influencer
References
- Baudrillard, Jean (1976) Symbolic exchange and death, tr. Iain Hamilton Grant. Sage Publications, 1993.
- Debord, Guy (1967) The Society of the Spectacle. tr. Fredy Perlman and friends (Black & Red, 1970; rev. ed. 1977).
- Postman, Neil (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.(20th Anniversary Edition) Penguin, 2005.