How much of your day do you spend staring at a screen?

"SCREENED OUT" by Jean Baudrillard May 6, 1996. ============================================
"Video, interactive screens, multimedia, the Internet, virtual reality - we are threatened on all sides by interactivity. What was separated in the past is now everywhere merged; distance is abolished in all things: between the sexes, between opposite poles, between stage and auditorium, between the protagonists of action, between subject and object, between the real and its double. And this confusion of terms, this collision of poles means that nowhere - in art, morality or politics - is there now any possibility of a moral judgment. With the abolition of distance - of the 'pathos of distance' - everything becomes undecidable.


And this is true even in the physical realm: when the receiver and the source of a transmission are too close together, a feedback effect ensues which scrambles the transmission waves; when an event and the broadcasting of that event in real time are too close together, this renders the event undecidable and virtual, stripping it of its historical dimension and removing it from memory. Whether it is virtual technologies which create undecidability or our undecidable world which gives rise to these technologies is itself undecidable. Wherever a mingling of this kind - a collision of poles - occurs, then the vital tension is discharged. Even in 'reality' TV, where, in the live telling of the story, the immediate televisual acting, we see the confusion of existence and its double. There is no separation any longer, no empty space, no absence: you enter the screen and the visual image unhindered. You enter your life as you would walk on to a screen. You slip on your own life like a data suit. Unlike photography, cinema and painting, in which there is a scene and a gaze, the video image - and the computer screen - induce a kind of immersion, a sort of umbilical relation, of 'tactile' interaction, as McLuhan, in his day, said of television. A cellular, corpuscular immersion: you enter the fluid substance of the image - possibly to modify it - in the same way as science infiltrates itself into the genome, the genetic code, to transform the body itself by that means. You move as you like, you make of the interactive image what you will, but immersion is the price to pay for this infinite availability, this open combinatorial of elements. It is the same with the 'virtual' text - any virtual text (the Internet, word-processing). This is worked on like a computer-generated image - something which no longer bears any relation to the transcendence of the gaze or of writing. At any rate, as soon as you are in front of the screen, you no longer see the text as text, but as image. Now, it is in the strict separation of text and screen, of text and image, that writing is an activity in its own right - never an interaction. Similarly, it is only with the strict separation of stage and auditorium that the spectator is a participant in his/her own right.


Everything today conspires to abolish that separation: the spectator being brought into a user-friendly, interactive immersion. The apogee of the spectator or his/her end? When all are actors, there is no action any longer, no scene. The end of the aesthetic illusion. Machines produce only machines. This is increasingly true as the virtual technologies develop. At a certain level of machination, of immersion in virtual machinery, there is no longer any man-machine distinction: the machine is on both sides of the interface. Perhaps you are indeed merely the machine's space now - the human being having become the virtual reality of the machine, its mirror operator. This has to do with the very essence of the screen. There is no 'through' the screen the way there is a 'through' the looking-glass or mirror. The dimensions of time itself merge there in 'real time'. And, the characteristic of any virtual surface being first of all to be there, to be empty and thus capable of being filled with anything, it is left to you to enter in real time into interactivity with the void.


Similarly, everything which is produced by way of machines is a machine. The texts, images, films, speech and programmes which come out of computers are machine products, and they bear the features of such products: they are artificially padded-out, face-lifted by the machine; the films are stuffed with special effects, the texts full of longueurs and repetitions due to the machine's malicious will to function at all costs (that is its passion), and the operator's fascination with this limitless possibility of functioning. Hence the wearisome character in films of all this violence and pornographied sexuality, which are merely special effects of violence and sex, no longer even fantasized by humans, but pure machinic violence which no longer even affects us. And this explains all these texts which resemble the work of 'intelligent' virtual agents, whose only act is the act of programming, the rest unfolding on purely automatic lines. This has nothing to do with ecriture automatique, which played on the magical telescoping of words and concepts, whereas all we have here is the automatism of programming, an automatic run-through of all the possibilities. Roll on the machine design of the body, the text, the image. This is called cybernetics: controlling the image, the text, the body from within, as it were, from its matrix, by playing with its code or the genetic details. It is this phantasm of the ideal performance of the text or image, the possibility of correcting endlessly, which produce in the 'creative artist' this vertige [giddiness - ed.] of interactivity with his own object, alongside the anxious vertige at not having reached the technological limits of his possibilities. In fact, it is the (virtual) machine which is speaking you, the machine which is thinking you.


And is there really any possibility of discovering something in cyberspace? The Internet merely simulates a free mental space, a space of freedom and discovery. In fact, it merely offers a multiple, but conventional, space, in which the operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites, established codes. Nothing exists beyond these search parameters. Every question has its anticipated response. You are the automatic questioner and, at the same time, the automatic answering device of the machine. Both coder and decoder - in fact your own terminal, your own correspondent. That is the ecstasy of communication. There is no 'Other' out there and no final destination. And so the system goes on, without end and without purpose. And its sole potential is for infinite reproduction and involution. Hence the comfortable vertige of this electronic, computer interaction - like the vertige induced by drugs. You can spend your whole life at this, without a break. Drugs themselves are only ever the perfect example of a crazed, closed-circuit interactivity.


To win you over to it, they tell you the computer is merely a handier, more complex kind of typewriter. But this is not true. The typewriter is an entirely external object. The page flutters in the open air, and so do I. I have a physical relation to writing. I touch the blank or written page with my eyes - something I cannot do with the screen. The computer is a true prosthesis. I am not merely in an interactive relation with it, but a tactile, intersensory relation. I become, myself, an ectoplasm of the screen. And this, no doubt, explains, in this incubation of the virtual image and brain, the technical faults which afflict computers, and which are like the failings of one's own body. On the other hand, the fact that identity is the identity of the network and never that of individuals, the fact that priority is given to the network rather than to the network's protagonists implies the possibility of hiding, of disappearing into the intangible space of the virtual, so that you are not detectable anywhere - even by yourself.


This resolves all problems of identity, not to mention those of alterity. So, the attraction of all these virtual machines no doubt derives not so much from the thirst for information and knowledge as from the desire to disappear, and the possibility of dissolving oneself into a phantom conviviality. A kind of 'high', which takes the place of happiness, of obvious happiness, by the very fact that happiness no longer has any raison d'etre here. Virtuality comes close to happiness only because it surreptitiously removes all reference to things. It gives you everything, but at the same time it subtly deprives you of everything. The subject is realized to perfection, but when realized to perfection, the subject automatically becomes object, and panic sets in."

 

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I'd think that no matter how much time you spend on the net you still remain an individual and don't "disappear" into the matrix but only visit there when you want to do so. You are in control of it, it isn't in control of you. If you cannot control yourself then you become addicted to being on the net but still will remain who you are individually.

 

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That's absolutely wrong. I have discovered great things on the internet. I have learned skills I never would have had otherwise. I have made real things thanks to the sharing of information. I have connected with communities of like-minded people with similar life issues and achieved new insights. The internet is changing everything!

Oh, and I spend most of my day in front of a screen.

 

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I kind of disagree with the loss of identity part . I personally think we are on the verge of convergence of the sub conscience though collectively and when we start to harness the power of the information age it will change human perception for ever more . Every one will have a stake , Everyone will have a voice . The more organized we get in our collectiveness of internet interaction the more we will be come of the same goal orientation of humanity as a whole. I don't see it as a loss of individualism , but more of an inclusion in the grand scheme of human activity

 

I think identity and individuality are two vastly different things. Identity would be like just what you are: a human, a self, a user, etc. Individuality is otoh being a unique one of these in contrast to others of your kind. But I think individuality is very subjective and highly overestimated. We are not iow near as individual as we might think. We wear the same clothes, do basically the same things, have practically identical DNA, and even tend to think and say the same things on cue. We are like pennies, each penny taking pride that due to some tiny scratch, nick or some only subjectively-noticeable defect in the coin's structure that it is a totally unique individual. And yet from the outside, at the level of objective identity where were are all just pennies, there is really very little individuality at all between us.


With virtual reality this neglibility of individuality becomes even more stark because look--in the end aren't we all really just doing the exact same thing at the same--typing on this screen and reacting to words AS IF we were this character with a set of preset beliefs and values and opinions? Is it more than coincidence that the more we "type" on this contraption the more "typified" we become, ideologues who have already made up their minds about everything and who therefore prove it by creatively convincing themselves anew of it at every point?

 

I see what you're saying. I see this as going from a static identity as a "thing" to a dynamic identity as a "process" or "activity". Shedding our comparative and outwardly-referential individuality in a faceless and voiceless medium, we become all the more the creative activity of thought and speech itself. A million of the same exact things, now being defined in their identity by what they do and say? Isn't that like how cells evolved into the neurons of our brain? Each neuron is, network-wise, the same exact thing. But it is what the neuron is DOING as any given moment, in relation to all the other actions at that moment, that defines the character of the collective whole.