Hyperreality, Media Personalization, Expectations, and Preferences
Ever since radio broadcasts were popularized, there have been great strides made in utilizing media technologies to influence consumers’ behavior and cognition. Once TV was introduced, advertisers knew they had us through the power of suggestion, Hearts and minds. Entire generations of humans live their lives in imitation of what they see on tv and listen to for entertainment.
Billions (72.09 billion to be exact) are spent on advertising and media. Because to put it plainly it works.
Firstly we must establish the concept of hyperreality and realize how it affects us all in an age of constant advertising and media bombardment none of us are above being influenced by the carefully manicured media we consume. With knowledge and understanding we can quell the beast and reel ourselves and our expectations back in. Back to something more real.
So what is it what is hyperreality other than a mouthful?
“Hyperreality is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.” Individuals will find themselves, for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world.
Hyperreality is significant as a paradigm to explain current cultural conditions. Consumerism, because of its reliance on sign exchange value (e.g. brand X shows that one is fashionable, car Y indicates one’s wealth), could be seen as a contributing factor in the creation of hyperreality or the hyperreal condition. Hyperreality tricks consciousness into detaching from any real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance. Essentially, (although Baudrillard himself may balk at the use of this word) fulfillment or happiness is found through simulation and imitation of a transient simulacrum of reality, rather than any interaction with any “real” reality.
While hyperreality is not a relatively new concept, its effects are more relevant today than when it was first conceptualized.
There are dangers to the use of hyperreality within our culture; individuals may observe and accept hyperreal images as role models, when the images don’t necessarily represent real physical people. This can result in a desire to strive for an unobtainable ideal, or it may lead to a lack of realistic role models.
Your parents or mentors are good examples of realistic role models who don’t have a pr agency to concoct a hyperreal image of themselves and are thus seen as mundane and taken for granted. Relative to a hyperreal Elon Musk or Kim Kardashian type media figure.
How does hyperreality relate to media personalization and our sacred, personal, and unjudgeable romantic preferences? Let me explain.
First let us establish what romantic “preferences” are.
“Today, I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavour to trace its imperfections, its perversions”
- Frantz Fanon
Romantic Preference is who we deem to be lovable Who is and is not deserving of particular kinds of love(platonic,familial, romantic)? How is love coded and reproduced? What, and who, is absent when love is represented?
The primary social practice of love has been through heteronormative, monogamous dating and marriage; there is a compelling and important radical argument that these relationship structures are oppressive and predicated on the uneven and gendered distribution of emotional labour. What I’m interested in is further investigating is what it means to not be legible within even these problematic discourses of love. Exclusion from such frameworks is not always tantamount to liberation — in fact, exclusion denotes an entirely different set of racialised oppressions. A series of small lessons learned through film, television and personal experience, accumulated to the eventual understanding that people who look a certain way or occupy a certain station cannot be the subject of love. If lucky enough to be selected, they can be objects of fetishisation — but that is very different to being perceived as lovable. What is often missing from accounts of the racial dynamics of ‘love’ and being ‘loved’ is an understanding of where these codes — of who can be loved, who cannot be loved and whose love matters — come from. Why do we have such a robust and universally understood racial grammar of desire, to the point where porn is literally categorised according to racist tropes?
So how do these two concepts collide and reveal how we have agency in shaping and reinforcing our romantic preferences? Curious why IR dating statistics mysteriously matches the societal pecking order? Is love truly blind? Read on and let me explain.
In the information age we are at an extraordinary level of media personalization today mostly due to the explosion of the internet and the consequential rise within the popularity of online media.
We personally choose who we watch on Instagram, we select on streaming sites the documentaries or movies that we watch, choosing from all over the world, we pirate anything we want to watch, we observe whoever we would like on platforms like Snapchat. People don’t watch television anymore and the cinema is no longer the number one vessel for movie watching.
Compared to a child of the past, How would they have access to media that positively portrays people that look like them? It would be nearly impossible to achieve.
In short we’ve got nearly limitless “preference” within the type of media that we choose to watch. We create our own media bombardment by selecting the people we watch.
The sort of media we select has two capacities:
A) It displays our romantic bias.
B) It shapes our racial(maybe redundant?) romantic preferences.
A) Media exhibits our bias — This is an intuitive and easy idea to understand.
If a person watches a ton of Dave Chapelle or Hip-Hop on Instagram, I will deduce that they are open to having relationships with Black people. If you browse , verysmartbrothas, and Abagond on I will deduce they are sympathetic to Black issues. If they follow Timbahwolf or Constance Wu on Instagram, I will assume they are open to relationships with Asian people.
If a person likes mostly Bluegrass artists and Bill Maher on Instagram, I will assume that they are into White folks and sympathetic to White issues.
For this very reason one could almost with absolute certainty know that particular individual of color is a self-hater through observing their media footprint, style, and presentation.
The more they make efforts to imitate and submit to white beauty standards the higher the percentage it is that one can determine that they normally do not consume media that displays people of color in a positive or non-othering way.
B) We decide on which media we observe and that reinforces our desirability biases.
We already know what i’m speaking on — watch a number of Black shows and of course someone will be greater into people who are black.
Watching chiefly white media suggests that a person will begin saying they have a “preference” for the company of white folks and that whites are more beautiful and become insecure about possessing non-white traits.
One curious factor about white media is that men of color are romantically non-existent and nearly all women of color will be romantically paired up with white men.
Media and Social Media are subtle forms of social pressure.
Media and Social Media acts as your second group of buddies. Your mind is incapable of differentiating among what your buddies do, and what the folks on the shows you watch do.
As far as your subconscious is concerned what’s occurring on the screen is taking place directly in front of you. Recorded media has been an invention for a short time within the lifetime of the human beings; personalized social media even newer.
Take an impressionable child and feed them mostly white media, what do they see? They basically believe that all of their peers aren’t in relationships with people of color. In other words White people have been pre-approved for them in an identical manner as if all of their real life friends suddenly began getting romantically involved with white people.
All of us realize the strength of something being ‘pre-approved’ or the power of branding.
Coke-A-Cola vs Great Value.
Meanwhile, A person that watches media with people of color sees that most of their friends are romantically involved with people of color.
That is why media is one of the biggest weapons and one of the most effective tools of white supremacy.
It assaults your unconscious and shapes your racial biases via the power of social pressure.
As sociological scholars have noted, A person can be consciously aware of white supremacy, yet at the same time subconsciously complicit in white supremacy by exhibiting white romantic preference.
Media in all of its forms shapes the unconscious if not viewed through a #woke filter. I find it quite doubtful that people watching things that portray people of color in a positive humanizing way fall into this particular conscious/unconscious contradiction.
“Activists” whose life dreams are to overthrow white supremacy but still go home to their white spouse at the end of the day
Further reading:
http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3094-decolonising-desire-the-politics-of-love
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hyperreality
http://interactioninstitute.org/searching-for-decolonial-love/
http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/realityhyperreality.htm
