wilbjammin

I apologize for any redundancy to previous entries, but I I have a feeling that I'm wording myself differently than everyone else... so I'm allowing myself to speak off the cusp.

I feel like I've just stepped into Jean Baudrillard's office.

There's an interesting thing about media... our lives are truly mediated to us. Before the age where media was a totality the method that one perceived reality was by direct experience more often than otherwise. This has been wildly reversed to the point where the vast majority of information we receive is interpreted for us, and culminated from simulacra (that is loosely defined as copies without an origins). There are many weird twists that I think about a lot that I'll innumerate:

1) Reality TV is the best example of a simulacrum. A completely fabricated situation that we know is fabricated, and yet somehow perceive as real simultaneously. On one level this wouldn't be so threatening, except that this is our collective experience as a culture. We share in these experiences and have discussions about these things, and eventually, we adopt a new reality from these simulacra. Eventually, "original reality" is removed so far by this process that we have moved beyond a point of knowing what it means to naturally be human.

2) News is turning more and more abstract on a seemingly daily basis. We are given more and more scripted commentary about events with less and less contextual footage of events, or incomplete footage (all footage is incomplete as it only provides a narrow scope of perception - we only experience a narrow visual field and sounds that reach the microphone that aren't edited out... the other senses, which are sadly given less attention that they should, are completely absent).

On a note of this, the idea of a democracy or a republic has always been couple with the concept of a responsible citizenry (see Machiavelli The Discourses, Jean-Jaques Rousseau The Social Contract). For a representative government to work it relies on the active participation of the citizens to educate themselves on the issues and make deliberated decisions. Since mediated reality has reached the totality that it has, so many are overwhelmed with information of all sorts of types of different qualities that coming to a reasoned, deliberated decision is exceedingly difficult because knowing what is real is so difficult. In fact, reality cannot be defined as what is true and factual now, reality is simply what you perceive and what you use to make decisions from. The post-modern terminology for reality is hyperreality, for obvious reasons.

3) Television dramas, particularly sit-coms, are other examples of simulacra. The interesting thing about these shows is that they tend to be accompanied by encapsulated moral messages as well as implied values in society. These shows mimic reality, and then place judgments on society, and give direction to society. As much as critical skeptic can try to bring all of these messages into check by considering all that is transmitted through these shows, it ends up invariably having an indeleble effect on all of us (whether we watch television or not, because once these values spread through macro-culture they are embedded in day-to-day interactions between everyone).

I could go much further in depth, but I think my 3 points illustrate the answer to the question, How much of an effect does the type of world we are living in have on us - our thinking and our behavior? - a nearly absolute effect.

But the real question, that I have been stumbling over for years, remains - what is left for the individual?

what meaning is left for us to create and what value does it have?

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Innominate.