Debord and Baudrillard in one word: alienation.
Baudrillard’s primary complaint about new media is that it does not permit interaction. Other authors have lodged similar complaints, but not this hopelessly. For Baudrillard, consumers becoming producers won’t fix the problem, and allowing an audience to respond to mass transmissions won’t substitute for interaction either. The whole media system is doomed, according to him, and the problem is in the fact that new media distances people, and substitutes transmission/reception broadcasting for reciprocal communication. Media today talks at the audience, not with them. In this way, modern media are not communication at all. Blogposts and television programs and radio transmissions and films and articles are not conversations. They’re all just one lone individual talking to himself in public.
This lack of human communication cannot be fixed by allowing everyone to participate in media’s production. This just means everyone is talking to themselves, and their messages become even more jumbled and anonymous. There is no room for conversation in this model. Baudrillard’s definition of communication depends on the creation of a single message by all of the communicators in a conversation. All the ideas and voices must be in direct contact, directly responding to each other, for there to be real interaction and real communication. So, essentially, there is no hope. At least not with media the way it is today.
Debord is similarly despondent. His argument brings back memories of all those Marxists from the beginning of the semester. Use a medium against itself by repurposing it for the cause, overthrow the consumerist society, etc. etc. But what I especially like was his new way of phrasing just how media dominates society and isolates people so they stay submissive: the ‘spectacle’. I kept imagining the ruling class flashing strobe lights and throwing glitter at the unwitting masses. But that’s not what it is at all. The spectacle is a fake mirror reality of sorts…it is media’s way of framing life: “a worldview transformed into an objective force”. We see reality through the distorted lens of media, and it becomes reality. But not really. And that’s the part that keeps us all alienated. We have to believe that the mirror world is the real world, but that means that we can’t interact with the real world. Our social relationships have to be carried out through the media, because they cannot exist outside of it without the whole illusion falling apart.
Debord and Baudrillard, I’m sorry you’re so lonely, but quite frankly it’s your own fault! I have a hard time believing Requiem for the Media was the product of lively social discussion.
Your final comment made me laugh, but I think you have a point. It's true that mass media can be a cause of alienation--how many of us have tried to carry on a conversation with someone, only to have them staring at their laptop or smart phone or iPod screen and just barely acknowledge the flesh-and-blood human talking to them? And, to be fair, how many of us are guilty of the same thing? However, while eternal engrossment in our mass media providers can be isolating, it also has the power to unify. The widespread dissemenation of information that is possible through media like the internet or television provides us with fodder for conversation--both intellectual and frivolous, but nonetheless unifyting in the fact that it sparks conversation. I know that personally many of my conversations with my friends are sparked by things I read or saw online. That piece of information (or gossip or fanart or blogging or whatever), provided to me by the mass media, provides me with a platform for interaction with my flesh-and-blood friends, which we then take to new and deeper levels through our conversation and continuing discourse. So the isolating effect of the mass media may be largely influenced by how individuals use it and how much they partake in it. If an individual makes a conscious effort to take what he/she views in the media into his/her organic human relationships, the media may prove to be less isolating for that individual.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree. I mean I can understand with the fact that media is becoming completely one-way, facebook and text messaging where people can have conversations sort of but really, the comments are not necessarily the most poignant and even easy to distinguish things. I mean it is easier to talk to someone in person and gauge their reaction to a proposal or fun topic without hearing the inundations of the voice or body language. I guess that is my main problem with texting...minus the emoticons the receiver may not be receiving the sender's message in all its sardonic humor or serious tone. But I cannot completely demonize mass media, as Christy pointed out, sometimes the inane or thought-provoking comments are made online via blogs or comments pages and those fuel conversation outside media.
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