Hyperreality
From monstrouspossibility
Hyperreality describes the inability to distinguish between the normative "real" and the "facsimile." As a philosophical and descriptive construct, it possess increasing importance in today's technologically advanced world because of the relatively ease of reproducing physical objects and the multi-medium transmission of information.
Contents |
[edit] Hyperreality in Literature
In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien describes his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War. A ways into the novel, he addresses the reader directly and hints that he is not telling the "whole truth" about many of his experiences and that some events may be fabricated altogether. The novels transforms from a simple war novel in a treatise on both the human infatuation with concepts of truth despite its definitional ambiguity and possible complete non-existence as a real construct.
O'Brien says he may have altered the details on some of the experiences he is recounting because he sees "truth" not as a direct presentation of facts, but as a presentation of information in such as way as to reconvey the emotions and experience of the events as he felt them. O'Brien acknowledges that many of his readers will become preoccupied with trying to hypothesis about where he is exaggerating or reinventing actual events.
[edit] Hyperreality in Museums
In his essay Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco concludes that hyperreality is dangerous and has the effect of detaching people for a more "substantial" reality, capability of interpretation and consequently the ability to make informed decisions. "Alongside the Good Whale there is the restless, plastic form of the Bad Shark... Thus, on entering his cathedrals of iconic reassurance, the visitor will remain uncertain whether his final destiny is hell or heaven, and so will consume new promises." Many Hyperreal avenues make the claim of presenting information impartially, while settling up two nonreal binaries. Do you want the Good Whale or the Bad Shark?
Many museums actively embrace hyperreality as an effective medium for presenting information. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Illinois... blahblahblah
Modern Hyperreality only becomes sophistry when studied by a non-reflective, non-critically responsive audience. In this respect it is no different than any other medium that permits the distribution of distorted or misleading information. A wholesale disenfranchisment of its communicative possibilities in just as unrealistic as a "Good Whale" vs. "Bad Shark" construct.
[edit] Hyperreality in News Programming
[edit] References:
Umberto Eco Travels in Hyperreality
Nick Perry Hyperreality and Global Culture
Timothy W. Luke Power Plays at the Exhibition
Wikipedia hyperreality
