Monday, January 28, 2008
CP24: The Ecstasy of Communication
Baudrillard, and his orders of simulacra, have interested me a great deal. I read some more of his ideas, and am in the middle of his very short book The Ecstasy of Communication (1987). I don't think we covered this notion last term, though I could be mistaken. In pink lettering on the book's backcover, is a quote from Baudrillard:
"Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of communication. We are no longer in the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication."
We live in a society in which there is an excess of information. To a large degree I believe this was facilitated by television. People now watched the daily "news", which reported on all of the significant world events. We were also swamped by TV commercials and advertisements in newspapers and magazines, which were meant to address every conceivable human need, and therefore appeared to encompass the breadth of the human experience. Nowadays, with the advance of telecommunications and the pervasiveness of the internet, there have been claims that we live in an "information age". This seems evident enough, but what of the consequences? Where is the real when all we experience is mediated as information?
I have disliked television for some time, and Baudrillard's arguments do not offer me relief in this regard. Let us consider the example of CP24 (CityTV). On the screen we are bombarded by images, data, and symbols, which I believe condition us, regulate us, and numb us to the real. Sports scores appear and disappear at the bottom of the screen, and stock market values flit past the eye, along with "real time" footage of traffic on the Don Valley Parkway and the 401. One third of the screen is devoted to news coverage in the conventional sense, with talking heads, sensationalized stories, sports reports and rehashed, edited news reports from home and abroad. I frequently access CP24 to check the day's weather forecast, and am confronted by symbols of either a "rainy" cloud, a "snowy" cloud, a cloud with both rain and snow, no cloud, etc. - TV has now prefigured our conceptions of something as varied and complex as the weather into neatly organizable symbols. I can attest that viewing these "weather symbols" does lend me a sense of control over the world, a feeling that I can know everything I need to know about today's weather (and the rest of the week) instantaneoulsy. Will the weatherman be out of a job in the near future?
The ecstasy of communication that all of this entails, is, according to Baurdillard, obscene. It is "the obscenity of that which no longer contains a secret and is entirely soluble in information and communication" (p.22). As I see it, mystery is dead and we have killed it. In my opinion, our society needs an experience of mystery to experience the real, for mystery makes life interesting and worthwhile. However, if this is true, I have no clue how we as a society would go about changing our mediums of communication to make this possible.
"Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of communication. We are no longer in the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication."
We live in a society in which there is an excess of information. To a large degree I believe this was facilitated by television. People now watched the daily "news", which reported on all of the significant world events. We were also swamped by TV commercials and advertisements in newspapers and magazines, which were meant to address every conceivable human need, and therefore appeared to encompass the breadth of the human experience. Nowadays, with the advance of telecommunications and the pervasiveness of the internet, there have been claims that we live in an "information age". This seems evident enough, but what of the consequences? Where is the real when all we experience is mediated as information?
I have disliked television for some time, and Baudrillard's arguments do not offer me relief in this regard. Let us consider the example of CP24 (CityTV). On the screen we are bombarded by images, data, and symbols, which I believe condition us, regulate us, and numb us to the real. Sports scores appear and disappear at the bottom of the screen, and stock market values flit past the eye, along with "real time" footage of traffic on the Don Valley Parkway and the 401. One third of the screen is devoted to news coverage in the conventional sense, with talking heads, sensationalized stories, sports reports and rehashed, edited news reports from home and abroad. I frequently access CP24 to check the day's weather forecast, and am confronted by symbols of either a "rainy" cloud, a "snowy" cloud, a cloud with both rain and snow, no cloud, etc. - TV has now prefigured our conceptions of something as varied and complex as the weather into neatly organizable symbols. I can attest that viewing these "weather symbols" does lend me a sense of control over the world, a feeling that I can know everything I need to know about today's weather (and the rest of the week) instantaneoulsy. Will the weatherman be out of a job in the near future?
The ecstasy of communication that all of this entails, is, according to Baurdillard, obscene. It is "the obscenity of that which no longer contains a secret and is entirely soluble in information and communication" (p.22). As I see it, mystery is dead and we have killed it. In my opinion, our society needs an experience of mystery to experience the real, for mystery makes life interesting and worthwhile. However, if this is true, I have no clue how we as a society would go about changing our mediums of communication to make this possible.
# posted by tetrahydra @ 8:15 PM 
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We collectively may go back to "mysterious" times, archaic world, and some youngsters who wear t- shirts "feudalism works" can root for that; as well as the increasing number, range and spectrum of religious movements.
the other question is not only how it is possible but how it is possible without foregoing the (arguably) good things which humanity embraced when chasing the dreams of enlightenment, rationality and progress.
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the other question is not only how it is possible but how it is possible without foregoing the (arguably) good things which humanity embraced when chasing the dreams of enlightenment, rationality and progress.
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