Mediated reality

A discussion of reality often involves a restriction to the corporeal and to the tangible parts of our lives. For example, the old philosophical query about the tree falling in the forest; if no one is around to see/hear it, did it really happen? And in this more and more mass-mediated world, the ‘real’ is becoming something harder to negotiate, as it supposedly eludes us beneath the commodified and commercialised life and culture. It’s in the same vein as this line (from a lawyer, no less) from The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett 1946) – “The truth is what the jury decides.” (not in this clip, but watch it anyway to see Lana Turner in white shorts). Just as the ‘truth’ is defined by what we know rather than some arbitrary fact, reality is what we make of it; there is no singular definitive ‘real’ that exists outside of our lives. The real consists of all the elements which make up our lives, and that (today) includes all things made machinic.

In Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty, John Ellis writes, ‘The twentieth century has been the century of witness,’ (2000:9). We are witnesses to, participants in, even those elements of human life that perhaps ethically (but what is ethical today?) should not be available to us as desirers and consumers. Something like peoples’ individual thoughts, which have always been available selectively in diary form, became moreso available with the publication of things like The Diary of Anne Frank, and can now be more crudely flaunted in the realm of the screen. No doubt Australia will take up a version of this how-to-ruin-your-life show, the manipulatively edited The Moment of Truth (I actually saw that episode in the US – watch this clip too and decide for yourself what his real thoughts were). We have entered a world where the entire scope of the earth exists on screen, spreads even further than the cinema and television screens that Ellis includes (15), where Google Earth allows us to see into US Army bases and (maybe) see your friend walking their dog in your neighbourhood. So, because these actual physical things exist in cyberspace, screenspace and soundspace, then things like blogging, celebrities who are made only on the television screen, and games, make up our reality with equal importance. We are witnesses of our reality, of the ‘underlying superabundance of information contained within the images and sounds’ of mediation (Ellis 2000:13).

When the contestant in this episode of Moment of Truth says “Some issues just shouldn’t be touched” does she have a point? Yes, probably. (Although I have no sympathy for her because she knows she’s there to risk her privacy.) But that response has no real place in the world today. Everything is available to overexposure (and to manipulated exposure, through the televisual-machine). That is the reality-machine of the twenty-first century.