event horizon

paul verilio's Open Sky has confirmed every fear i've had of modern society...
and gave me a few original thoughts of my own:

Under the context of stimuli theory: one, that people have varying degrees of needed stimuli; two, that people must fill this need somehow--consider the past.before the urbanism the filling stimuli was god.under the constant stimulation of new media--television, cell phones, internet, yes, even myspace--the former stimuli is replaced. Nietzche was wrong, in the modern age of immediate stimuli, god is not dead, he's unemployed. His/her job had been outsourced to the very media that destroys your place in the physical world.where is anima, the soul. Human life as we know it is over in much of the world, and for many of the people in it. The apocalypse is not far-off or iminent as we once imagined, it is here, in all dromospheric pollution that destroys our human way of life. The apocalypse is not a fixed event in time, it is your neighbor, your children, your friends and your family--it is any corrosion of our physical space in favor of sedentary telepresence. In other words, the instant communication of this message destroys the physical space of human existence, and hence, is apocalyptic.

what a heavy simulacrum

Baudrillard... WHOA!!! Heavy, indecipherable stuff on first read... Read it slower the second time around. Love that he uses Borges--father of magic realism--in the beginning of his essay on hyperreality. I went to wikipedia for a little clarification on simulacrum and found this nice example.

French social theorist Jean Baudrillard gave the term a specific meaning in the context of semiotics, extended from its common one: a copy of a copy which has been so dissipated in its relation to the original that it can no longer be said to be a copy. The simulacrum, therefore, stands on its own as a copy without a model. For example, the cartoon Betty Boop was based on singer Helen Kane. Kane, however, rose to fame imitating Annette Hanshaw.[citation needed] Hanshaw and Kane have fallen into relative obscurity, while Betty Boop remains an icon of the flapper. from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum

I think part of the argument also hints that our social evolution has moved far beyond our physical evolution. Or at least, I extract that from the argument. For example, panic attacks... panic attacks are a completely natural human response to danger... when you're a primitive human walking around the jungle and a tiger shows up, you need to get terrified, and prepare to battle or run... the tiger is an example of an original manifestation of human danger in the ancient "reality," but in the hyperreality, the tiger is no longer here... Now there's only the morning of a job interview which leads anxiety to ensue and perhaps causing a panic attack. The body can't tell the difference between the original danger (a tiger) and the new simulated danger (not getting the job) our minds create the concept of danger. Prehistoric mans needs were to get food and not get eaten. We don't have this problem today, so our concept of danger becomes skewed, and we're left with panic attacks.. a prehistoric natural advantage of reality that only works against us in hyperreality.

sets his trist with trystero

I find it interesting how much everyone want to lay Oedipa... Driblette is interesting. Kind of an anti-Benjamin. Art isn't for the masses, or from the masses, it's in Driblette's head. I'm not entirely sure what the exact point of the book is, but maybe that is the point... the form of it. Like, maybe it's medium is its message. It meanders through all these different, seemingly unconnected things that are somehow thrown together by this loose idea of trystero that no one understands. Sort of like modern life. One does not get up to till the field, finish tilling the field, eat, sleep, repeat. Modern life is full of all these different facets of reality that are somehow loosely tied together by the concept of one's individual life. Modern life is like a search for trystero, full of twists and turns that never really confirm anything. What are we now? We have we ever been? Can we ever know?

hot and cold?

I found McLuhan's concepts of hot and cold to be a bit too elastic. I didn't quite understand what he meant. The terms didn't seem defined enough... although the medium is the message made perfect sense to me. New Media is not linear like print...

Mechanical Marxism

Walter Benjamin makes some interesting points about the influence of the medium of film on society. I think his political agenda to some extent leads him towards destroying the concept of the artist, allowing it to be swallowed for the sake of the masses. Hmmm, in that context Marxism looks more like the tyrranical majority of pure democracy. Funny.