/I was recently reading an introduction to the psychologist and linguist Jacques Lacan. Much of his work involved making sense of how we understand and conceptualise our reality into language. Essentially Lacan argues that
Our internal world is made up of memories of objects from the physical world (signifiers). These objects we identify with and base our labels of those objects on, using language. If we take a mundane object, a train, for example. The signifier will be a visual object from the past that lives in our imagined internal memory. These memories allow us to create a label, to on.
This enables us to correctly identify the differences in worldly objects and make sense of the world. This is an extremely basic explanation of Laca’s life work. I wanted to show how our minds are being warped by unrealistic expectations/world views we cannot replicate without technological existence.
“Metaphors of the Actual World”
Michael Wolf says that: ‘The digital world exists on metaphors of the actual world. These metaphors are Trojan horses by which the new digital enterprisers slip into reality?.
In essence, what Michael is saying is that the digital world offers a new way of relating but is still based on Lacan’s theory of signifiers and the signified (that the digital world is based on our lived physical experience).
However let us pause at the notions of the Trojan horses by which new digital enterprisers slip into reality.
I want us to think about the wealth of new technological evolution in our lives. Over the Christmas break, I watched a lot of TV and films in different formats, HD SD, 3D. So much choice of which I relish, and yet something became present while I was watching. It was overly real, overly rich.
Better than reality?
Let us pause here for a moment and think about the statements. The statement better than real life, 4k, or any other imagery marketing speak that is cooked up by technology makers. Thinking back to Lacan, many are using the visual objects from the better than real life digital reality to create signifiers which we use in our SD physical world. I have focused on TV and film but this type of hyper imagery is all around us, on are smart phones, on the internet, while looking for a flat, buying a car, we are creating unrealistic imagery of worldly objects by experiencing them first via the digital reality, before experiencing them in the physical world.
This always reminds me of the way grass looks on a football pitch (Soccer) when watching a game in HD for the first time. I remember vividly looking at the grass and being in awe by the look of it. Real grass doesn’t look that good and I have forever called it ‘HD grass’. Yet this ‘better than real life’ is not real, it’s a man-made glorified rendered HD visual representation of a real object, an object that many of us expect and indeed seek and pine for and yet is unobtainable in the real world.
Now, this is not the same as old school advertising. Advertising plays on the object’s physicality in the real world, maybe with unrealistic, real world circumstances to which we can relate to in the real world. This new representation, however, is based on a man-made, better than real life visual representation of real world objects, which are unattainable in the physical world (you will never look at grass and think it looks the same as HD grass).
HD grass
This exacerbates our want and needs to live in our deluded but more pleasing virtual world. The Virtual world allows us to live in the comfort of social media and HD grass. Our physical selves and the physical world seem a bit, humdrum; The dating app Tinder slogan ‘like real life, but better’ springs to mind.
It seems then that many are searching for something in the physical world which was created and can only exist in that world and yet has transitioned into our physical expectations.
No wonder many of us feel lost without technology as if living in the physical world seems lacking in comparison and doesn’t seem ‘real enough’. Just think of the colour one could experience if this was in HD! But alas, we are trapped in the physical world. Destined to look at our HD smart phone screens or our 4K television sets in order to live in this hyper reality.
Unless someone, like Google, could make some Technology that sits over the eyes; Providing a digital HD filter on our physical SD world. Oh wait, we now have Google Glass.
