In
the world of movie entertainment, producers have found a new vehicle for
drawing customers into theaters to see their films. Virtual reality is being increasingly used to
provide a novel kind of movie experience.
Spectators no longer experience the invisible barrier of a screen to
separate them from the story or the documentary that they are watching. And although 3-D movies did allow people to
experience some actual depth in what they were observing, the people were still
apart from everything that was happening.
With virtual reality films, viewers are immersed in the middle of what
is happening almost as if they are actually in the story or the flow of the
documentary. Some movie directors feel
that seeing a story or a documentary separated by the experience of a screen
flattens out the total movie experience for a viewer and prevents the viewer
from living the movie experience the way that the director would want.
In
effect, virtual reality films are a kind of hybrid between screen reality and
virtual reality. Although in some
situations there is some interaction, for the most part, the person
experiencing these films is still primarily a viewer as would be the case in
the world of pure screen reality. At the
same time, there is no firm barrier separating the viewer from what he is
experiencing, as is typical of screen reality.
Screen reality and virtual reality somehow blur together in virtual
reality films.
But
blurring between different kinds of realities doesn’t stop here. We as human beings primarily function in a
world with mass, matter and substance. A
world of external world reality. It is a
world where we can have rich vibrant experiences and meaningful life narratives
that include making, receiving, and preserving organic imprints. It is a world where we can use our preserved
organic imprints as a foundation for a surrogate immortality.
We
have taken for granted the importance of this world. It is the world that gives us grounding and
orientation. It is the world that gives
us direct sensory bonding to our surroundings.
It is the world where we feel direct sensory impact with the figures
that surround us. And we lose all this
when we enter the highly vacuumized world of virtual reality where all the
figures in it are like animate and inanimate ghosts.
And
the unfortunate thing is that as we become more involved with, more immersed in
the film worlds created in virtual reality, they will become models for the way
we experience life after we walk out of the movie theater. It will lead to an even greater blurring
together with external world reality than that which occurred with the screen
reality of traditional movies, television programs, video games and computer
activities. Screen reality has always
been in front of us existing side by side with the external world reality that
surrounds the screen. The external world
reality that surrounds the screen acts as an anchor in the external world that
prevents us from totally immersing ourselves in screen reality. That same anchor of a frame does not exist as
strongly in a virtual reality film where we are surrounded by what we see. Granted that because it is a film, it has
more of an external world frame than other virtual reality activities like
virtual reality visits to places. On the
other hand, films are likely to reach groups of people that other virtual
reality activities won’t reach. People
who like films are likely to go to virtual reality films whether or not they
are involved with virtual reality in any other way. So the influence of virtual reality film is
likely to reach a lot of people who would not normally get involved with
virtual reality.
In
previous articles, there has been a discussion of how complex machine and robot
figures can gradually supplant human figures as sources of mirroring and
modeling for young people growing up.
And so machines on the one hand and humans on the other begin to blur
together in young people’s minds as composite figures to be imitated and emulated.
Now environments themselves can mirror and model for young people. However, because the vacuumized environments
of virtual reality lack mass, matter and substance, they are incapable of
providing real grounding. They do
provide some orientation of place, but without real grounding, it is a little
like a dream. Without real grounding,
there is a sense of floating in space.
This, by the way, is a little different from screen reality. At least with screen reality, there is a kind
of frame of external world reality around it.
One is partly grounded in external world reality, while looking into a
vacuumized space.
So
what is going to happen as people increasingly hop back and forth between
environments of external world reality and environments of virtual
reality? It will be particularly easy
and accessible to enter virtual reality as more and more virtual reality films
are made so that directors can be particularly sure that viewers “deeply
experience” what is being displayed. In
fact, virtual reality provides the opportunity to experience intense happenings
without meaningful consequences, without a strong impact on mass, matter or
substance – in other words, with no real threat of damage or danger to
life. And virtual reality films provide
a portal to having virtual reality experience for many people who are
interested in films and would not necessarily search out a virtual reality
experience for its own sake. Which means
that films are going to greatly expand the audience of virtual reality experiences. So as more and more people hop back and forth
between external world reality and virtual reality films, virtual reality is
going to increasingly become a model for how people want to live in external
world reality. It is going to mirror
external world reality, and find it wanting because the latter has so much
friction and is so much less safe as a result of a lack of mediation. It is going to create a greater and greater
impetus to make external world reality more frictionless and mediated like
virtual reality, in order to avoid discomfort and pain. In people’s minds, external world reality and
virtual reality will start to blur together.
However,
as people start to experience life increasingly as more frictionless and
mediated, because it is being made more vacuumized, people will sink into more
profound levels of numbness than ever before.
And as they sink into these deeper levels of numbness, their will to
conduct their own lives freely will be weakened. In past articles, I have talked about this
numbing of the will, and I have called it conative anesthesia – conation being
a fancy word for processes related to the will.
No wonder so many Americans put their lives in the hands of an
authoritarian leader like Donald Trump.
He makes executive decisions with a level of certainty that many
Americans are having difficulty developing in themselves.
The
proliferation of virtual reality films will make an exceedingly numbing
experience highly accessible to many ordinary people and push them to fight
back in some way against the living death that comes with numbness, the
psychological state of becoming robots that are susceptible to being operated
by other people. Or, looked at from
another perspective, they will feel a need to fight back against becoming like
zombies. And a few of these people, in
order to fight back against becoming zombies, will commit mass acts of terror
in order to generate the abrasive friction inside themselves that allow them to
temporarily feel fully alive and fully connected with the external world. Many, of course, will become zombified. Witness all the people who submit their weak
wills to the will of Trump. Imagine how
zombified they will become as they sink into increasingly deeper levels of
numbness from the increasingly deeper levels of numbing experience as
represented by virtual reality films.
So
virtual reality films may not be the totally positive experiences its promoters
proclaim it to be. As numbing as screen
reality technology has proven to be, virtual reality technology has the
potential to be even more numbing. And,
in the long run, even more dangerous to our existence as organic human beings
with defined coherent senses of self.
© 2017 Laurence Mesirow
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