A couple of weeks back Our lives are filled with symbols all around us. Some of those symbols, or words, idea’s or expressions are directly related to the stuff in our reality. The word ‘apple’ refers to the thing in reality we now as an apple. But a lot of our symbols no longer refer to something in reality, but instead merely refer to another symbol. Last time I gave the example of a war or an explosion. When we see such imagery on TV, those images get their meaning because they are related to other images of war and explosions. As not all of us have experienced an explosion in real life the explosion in the evening news gets its meaning in relation to, for instance a Hollywood explosion: no reference to reality but to something fictious.
9/11 is a good example in this respect. Those ‘explosions’ in the Twin Towers were almost exact copies of what we’re used to seeing in the movies: huge fireball-like explosions. But of course it was not explosions, but airplanes crashing. In all the conspiracy theories around you see something similar happen. If something can’t be explained, we look to other symbols to try to explain what really happened. So: “the WTC collapsed like a controlled demolition”, or “the hole in the Pentagon was similar to the holes left in Milosevic’s house after a missile attack”. It’s all referring to other symbols of reality and thus reality imploding upon itself, creating a hyperreality.
How does that relate to convergence and technological innovation (two of the themes that we’re interested in)? Well, foremost we always try to explain ‘new’ stuff in terms of the old. So when the first car was introduced we compared it to the horse and wagon that we knew existed. The engine was put in the front, to make the new piece of technology similar to the old, so people could understand what they were seeing. Now, we are able to watch video on our mobile phones and we call it ‘mobile TV’. But in no way is that experience like watching TV.
In this age where we are overloaded with information and imagery, reality is imploding on itself faster and faster. Almost everything refers to something else, but not necessarily to something real. In the overload of information the boundaries are blurring. Convergence is thus moving beyond the physical: it’s not just our technologies that are blurring, it’s our reality that is converging as well. Where does that lead, and will it ever diverge again?
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Very good points. You might want to look at the BBC documentary-series “How Art Made the World” to find additional support for your line of reasoning. There it is explained why people are so susceptible (by nature and experience) to imagery.
Similar effects can also be seen in robotics. For example, the experiment where elderly people were given an Aibo robotdog for company and comfort, with which they developed a ‘real’ connection and actually felt comforted.