Welcome to the Desert of the Real
This phrase that Morpheus tells Neo in The Matrix (which was also chosen as the title of Slavoj Zizek’s book), is a quote from Baudrillard who talks of a hyperreality where symbols no longer refer to anything in the ‘real world’ but just to other representations of representations. Castells talks of a virtuality replacing reality, where the virtual “works on consciousness and behavior as real experience works on dreams”. In my Masters dissertation, I wrote of the Virtual Construction of Reality. Not only is reality mediated to us through media, but even real experience is reframed by our interaction with media. This crisis of reality has long been percolating. What becomes of our world when we can no longer distinguish the real from the hyperreal, when the mechanism of reality is taken over by the virtual machine?
Reality is increasingly being enveloped in a virtual haze, there is an increasing gamification where game mechanics and logic intertwined with real world content creates a kind of gamified reality that plays itself out across a screen. Individual realities and identities are increasingly being formed or reformed through a virtual process that is increasingly disconnected from the real world. What results from this ungrounding is a pervading sense of fakeness. We saw this recently play out in the assassination attempt of Trump, where people on both sides were seen to remark on the unrealness of the event, leading to conflicting conspiracy theories. Whether it was actually orchestrated or not is not the point here, but that many people experienced it as an orchestrated rather than a ‘real’ event.
But we are not doomed to forever wander this desert of mechanical virtuality. We do not have to allow ourselves to be taken over by the virtual machine. As the sociologists Berger and Luckmann point out “however objectivated, the social world was made by men — and, therefore, can be remade by them”. We can take back control! (Yet, not in the way of the postmodernists for whom the only end is power, and the only creator is the collective). This is why media studies (and particularly PR and marketing) ought to be taught to all students, not so they can learn how to more effectively manipulate others, but so that they can recognize its power in order to not be so easily manipulated by it.
