I understand completely. I like what you have to say about living and experiencing the moment as it unfolds and not years later with a photograph. Although I have to admit, I take a lot of photos when I go to concerts but I am often not looking in the viewfinder, rather I am hold the camera in a different direction as I pay attention to the action unfolding. It's taken me years to learn that I wasn't actually "experiencing the experience" as you so eloquently state. Thanks for a great read. :)

Hey there,

Very nice post, as usual. You describe perfectly modern society's preoccupation with what Jean Baudrillard termed 'Hyperreality'.

In Baudrillards theories, 'Simulation' means the creation of a real through conceptual models presented by the media. The media itself is so widespread and influential so as to induce simulation into becoming our perception of reality. The line between what is real and what the media dictates us breaks down, creating a hyperreal world where it becomes difficult to distinguish between the real and unreal. Baudrillard does not mean that what we perceive as reality is simply an illusion; he means that the illusion has become the reality.

"The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control-and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or a negative instance; it is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere." - Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation 2

In essence, the west's obsession with the media is far more real than the physical world it resides in. Thus, reality is conquered by the hyperreal, which is simply simulated stimuli craved more by humans than actual reality. The value of a played back recording is elevated to equal or higher levels than the actual live experience, or in the case of pornography, the videos become "sexier than sex itself" and are getting craved more than the actual act.

This obsession with simulacrum has lead to the creation of a new order - morality has been traded for efficiency; truth has been traded for symbolic meaning. Everything in modern society has been reduced to its representational value.

Welcome to the desert of the real.

Thank you both for your comments. Years ago,in grad school, I read a book by the psychoanalyst Ernst Schachtel entitled Metamorphisis. He discussed how we evolve at the ontogenic level and discussed what he labeled "the conventionalization of language and thought." Like the notion of hyperreality, Schachtel discussed the process of developing language and then invariably caming to responded to the linguistic represenatation of an object rather than to an object itself, i.e., we respond to the word glass and whatever associations we have to the word, the symbol, rather than to the palpable thingness of glass in whatever form it presents itself to us at that moment in reality. In effect we miss the real glass for the word-symbol glass. This is how, according to Schachtel, language and thought become conventionalized. He highlights the irresistible seductiveness, the efficiency of thnking and dealing in conventions rather than real events, real objects, real things, even real people.

Several years later, I discovered, while on a acid trip, that only then could I actually spend expanded time periods looking at "that" glass, feeling it, its textures, its surface temperatures, its artfulness, color, transparency, visual distortioning in its lens capacity, and on and on. That was the point: it was an infintely (as it were) fascinating object that I had never taken the time to notice, to imbibe in, to savor. A simple glass was truly fascinating. As was everything else that late evening and early morning.

That was a transformative experience for me and it did not devolve into a state-dependent insight. I carry it with me today, many, many years past my flirtation with psychedelics. Perhaps that's what grates so much with the growth in this mediated reality, this hyperreality. And it seems that great minds like Schachtel and Baudrillards all find the same road to Rome, a road that apparently has to be eternally discovered with each generation of people and technology.

Thanks again, guys.

Stuart