Is it live or is it Memorex?
Posted on August 18, 2007
Filed under Reflections
You know how old you are if you recognize this phrase. It helps us look historically at how long we’ve been living in a mediated and represented world and how rapidly it’s changed in the last 30 years.
(It was an advertisement for a cassette tape, a technological innovation in the 70s. It preceded CDs.) The other day I walked by an elegant home furnishings store and noticed a tall faux torch. I immediately registered it as fake. It didn’t occur to me to classify it any other way but as fake. The thoughts which followed went something like this:
I bet there are people who have never seen a “real” torch. Would they immediately classify this one as fake, as I do? My friends have homes with a lot of fake things. The “real” things, often their materials, are unattainable, unavailable or undesirable. Most of my peers (40s-50s, middle class) have experienced real torches, stone walls, wood floors, house plants, etc.. I wonder how many of us have stopped acknowledging the distinction between real and fake and in what contexts of our lives this happens. And in what contexts does is matter?
I still have one cognitive foot firmly planted in Europe (having lived there for 9 years). I realize in hindsight one of my core connections (after living previous to that in southern California for 15 years) is to the sense of the authentic and real. Europeans take pride in the fact that the real stuff is there and the fake stuff is here (a particular generation of them do, anyway.)
Now I’m spending most of my waking hours in or around Second Life, which is only a gradation of the simulated world we live in. I highly recommend Sherry Turkle’s, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Written in 1995, it puts Second Life in historical perspective. A psychologist by training, Turkle blends thought from philosophy, computer and social sciences to paint a thought provoking perspective on Second Life, 10 years before it existed.
She offers a palatable description and analysis of our evolving simulated world and experiences of it. Why can’t we have both the real and the fake torch, the Disneyland and the Florida Everglades or zoo-ed alligator? Without an historical perspective, we have difficulty recognizing the extent to which most people alive NOW have lived their entire lives in a mediated/represented world they experience as real. French social theorist Baudrillard (1988) writes, ” Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is a Disneyland.”
Baudrillard, J. (1988). Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford University Press. pp 171-72.
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