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Hyper-reality and the Digital Renaissance
In this article Stephen Hill explores the way in which the use of media technologies confront audiences experience of reality. He argues that far from undermining our humanity they often serve to reinforce it.
Introduction From the telephone to Facebook, the way
in which audiences appropriate new media technology has, historically, been characterised by the collapse of the distinction between the real and the simulated: the substitution of face to face interaction with a hyper-real experience mediated by technology. When Alexander Graham Bell launched the telephone in 1876 is was not simply a revolution in communication systems but it also sewed the seeds of a more wide-ranging transformation about the way in which society thought about itself and culture. In substituting the human voice for synthesized copy transmitted through sound waves and electrical signals, Bell in effect invented post- modernism: the routinised use of technology and the proliferation of the virtual realities. Indeed, the history of media technology
in the twentieth century was built on this premise: cinema, television, music video and computer games all invite the audience to suspend disbelief and inhabit a parallel fantasy world made possible only by successive
advancements in technology. From a theoretical standpoint, this concept has been recouped by various thinkers who have characterised the proliferation of media technology and the collapse of the distinction between the real and simulated as ‘simulacrum’, ‘hyper-reality’, ‘parody’ and ‘pastiche’. And, indeed, this is a line of fault that many media texts self-consciously explore; the last thirty years has seen a profusion of films, television and pop music that play with audience expectations in their use of intertextual references and self-reflexive allusions. However, perhaps what marks out the genuinely postmodern from ironic critique is the way in which audience appropriation of new media technologies is both naturalised and creative.
Cinema and television Throughout the history of television and
cinema, audiences have traditionally been very accepting of the ways in which media texts invite the viewer to confront their own perception of reality. As the silent movie era moved into that of the talking picture, for example, audiences did not recoil with incredulity that the image projected on to the screen was actually speaking, but accepted the concept as natural and unaffected. Likewise, when the first television sets became commercially available in the 30s and 40s, audiences embraced the new medium, inviting it into their homes to occupy pride of place in the sitting room: displacing the fire place as the focal point of domestic living.
By the same token audiences have been
extremely imaginative in the way in which new media technologies have been incorporated into their day-to-day existence. Who would have thought that cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments with stereoscopic images in the 1870s would develop into a staple venue for romantic courtship in the twentieth century: even today going to see a movie is one of the most popular activities for couples on a date. Likewise, television has become embedded in the social fabric of every day life: both shaping and reflecting society’s ideas about contemporary social issues. While the kind of current affairs programming characterising a channel like BBC News 24, was probably close to what John Logie Baird had in mind when he began experimenting with duotone images in the first part of the twentieth century. Formats produced principally for entertainment, like soap opera and sitcom, have arguably done more to influence popular opinion about contemporary social issues including abortion, single- mothers, homosexuality and immigration than anything else.
The internet Of course the proliferation of the internet
from the late 1990s onwards has accelerated and heightened people’s routine use of technology in their day-to-day engagement with society and culture. And, indeed, it is befitting that the proliferation of laptops, wireless and broadband technology in the
english and media centre | December 2009 | MediaMagazine 59
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