Up
until relatively recently in history, most people could agree on what
constituted a common sense objective reality.
Subjective reality was something else, and certainly each individual
permitted to a degree the projection of the sensations and perceptions of his
subjective reality to spill over into the mutually accepted objective reality
of the people around him. Subjective
reality was filled with the flowing blendable continual stimuli of emotions,
which, in turn, influenced the way the world was sensed and perceived. Certainly objective reality also had plenty
of flowing blendable continual stimuli in the form of the blurry melting
sensations from nature (so beautifully captured by the French Impressionists),
but there were also a lot more defined discrete stimuli that gave the world the
firm outlines and boundaries needed to operate within its spaces, and, in
particular, needed by individuals to operate in such a way as to maintain the
maximum functionality while working with all the other different people living
within the world’s confines.
Since the advent of
modern technology, several new kinds of reality have been created, and, as a
result, the very way we look at the whole notion of reality in general has
changed. I am thinking here of screen
reality, with its sub-categories of movies, television, video games, computers,
tablets and smartphones, as well as augmented reality and virtual reality. Screen reality refers to those versions of
reality that have been developed by modern technology to be presented on flat
two-dimensional surfaces. In some
manifestations of screen reality, three-dimensional external world reality is
compressed onto two-dimensional surfaces.
This is the result of ethereal vacuum stimuli, which are used in screen
reality to replace all the space-occupying substance and mass that are found in
phenomena in external world objective reality.
This vacuumizing of phenomena gives them almost a ghost-like quality
that makes our experience of them very different from the way we experience
phenomena in the everyday objective world in which we live and operate. For one thing, there is just not the same
organic bonding with vacuumized phenomena in an electronic picture. But, in particular, there is this
other-worldly quality that comes from an electronic picture. Like a person could never really cross paths
with a screen reality phenomenon. So
screen reality creates a subtle reconfiguration of the way he experiences the
world in his field of experience. Screen
reality blurs with external world reality and a generalized detachment of the
user occurs as a result of the sensation of flattening and isolating of the
world from all the vacuum stimuli that spill out of the screen reality into the
external world reality.
The
sense of flattening gets lost in virtual reality but not the sense of
isolation. One is still using seeing as
the primary sense of encounter within commercial applications of virtual
reality today. There is still no
touching, grasping or holding within these applications of virtual reality,
even though phenomena seem more real than they do in screen reality. But even when researchers discover how to
make touch a part of the virtual reality package, it won’t be the same as
natural touch, because it will be based on defined discrete digital stimuli
rather than flowing blendable continual organic stimuli. It won’t feel the
same. It won’t be bonding to something
with substance and mass. And because one
is surrounded by a vacuumized field of experience in virtual reality, one doesn’t
have an objective external world reality around the edges of its boundaries to act as a comparison, as with screen reality,
and to give a person a substantive organic anchor in that way.
Augmented
reality is a reality that combines elements of external world reality and
screen reality. Screen reality sounds,
graphics and data are superimposed on top of the direct experience of the
external world. The screen reality aspect
is meant to increase one’s understanding and appreciation of the naked external
world. It is as if modern humans are
incapable of imparting sufficient meaning themselves to the experience of the
external world.
So
here we have all these new kinds of reality to add to objective external world
reality and subjective reality. And it
is interesting to see how these different kinds of old and new reality can be
mixed together in different ways. And
this is likely to happen because all of these realities except objective
external world reality are not common sense realities. They are not sensorily grounded
realities. So now we get ungrounded not
only through our emotions and intimate sensations in subjective reality, but in
our very perceptions of the external world in screen, augmented and virtual
realities. And I would submit that not
only do ungrounded emotions and intimate sensations influence the way we
experience our perceptions, but also perceptions that are ungrounded by modern
technological realities can, in turn, unground our internal thought processes
that are based on our connection to our objective external world reality. The sensory distortion that these modern
realities create because of the way that they vacuumize our fields of
experience makes us not only ungrounded, but unbalanced, less rational, a
little crazier.
Along
comes Donald Trump, who is a master of dealing with modern realities. He had his own reality show – The Apprentice
– which was really a blurring of Trump’s subjective reality, objective external
world reality and screen reality. In
other words, it was a Trump reality that played with people’s minds. And nowadays, there are Trump’s tweets which
combine his subjective reality with the screen reality of a twitter
account. And somehow Trump feels (and
many of his followers feel) that his internal subjective reality is given a
greater gravity, a greater grounding as a result of its fusion with the
externalized screen reality of Twitter.
To the point where the externalized screen reality of Twitter is
imparted with the gravity, the grounding of an objective external world
reality. What Trump says is supposedly
fact even when it is pure lies or fantasy.
In other words, the screen reality of Twitter acts as a bridge by which
Trump’s subjective reality becomes an objective external world reality.
And
people today, with their extensive experience with different screen realities
and with their developing experience with both augmented reality and
particularly virtual reality are very open to blurring the boundaries between
different realms of reality. They are
increasingly predisposed to becoming ungrounded from objective external world
reality and bouncing around many different realms of technological
reality. And they are increasingly open
to a man like Trump who imposes his subjective reality on other people’s
objective external world reality through the bridge of different modes of
technological reality. Trump has become
a model for how an authoritarian regime can be established in a democratic
country. Perhaps the novel 1984
was just a few decades off in what it depicted.
Unless the American people can find ways to resist the reality-bending
visions that he creates.
© 2017 Laurence Mesirow
No comments:
Post a Comment