Baudrillard has suggested that ''the real'' is now an effect of what we see on screen. Discuss.

By Jessica Ruxton

Introduction

"We have eliminated the real world - which world is left? The world of appearances? Not at all. Together with the real world, we have eliminated also the world of appearances" (NIETZSCHE) - Jean Baudrillard: Integral Reality Essay (from the European Graduate School) Baudrillard may touch upon the subject of what is real and what isnt. I also want to look at what the real world is to us and why we are so transfixed by it. I will talk about our gadgets and gizmos and how we spend a lot of time on screen observing the unreal and being too preoccupied with them. But I will also look at the movies we watch in the cinema, on our devices and on out TV. The things we see in movies but not in real life and wanting those events to occur realistically. When people say the movie was just showing the way things are. It was real. They do not want to hear the awful truth that movies do anything BUT show reality. What is real and what is fiction? Commercials and reality shows seize TV nowadays but how do we know they are real and not just scripted? I will talk about each of these points in detail.

So why do we look at our screens so often?

Research has found that on average we spend about 12 hours per day staring at different screens such as computers, TV, mobile screens, iPods/iPhones and more. A study of our screen-based habits revealed that we spend three hours per day watching TV, 4.7 hours in front of computers (at home, in college, at work) and 1.2 hours looking at our phones. To top it all off we spend 11.8 on gadgets such as iPads and e-readers. Nikki Sellers (of whom commissioned the study), said: "TVs, computers and other gadgets like the iPad and e-reader have become central to peoples lives, so it's not surprising that the average person spends so much of their time staring at a screen. Our screen

eccentric lives have also turned our homes into treasure troves of digital devices." (http://newslite.tv/2011/05/27/we-spend-12-hours-per-day-star.html) The bizarre effect of not having screen-time on a regular basis causes us to have withdrawal symptoms, which sounds abnormal but I, too, can relate to these symptoms. We bring our phones to bed, check them before we fall asleep and check them almost immediately after waking up. If we wake up during the night to get water we bring our phones with us and yet again, check them. If we are bored in class, waiting on someone, at a friends house we have our phones nearby and Internet to keep us company. Just recently I met up with a friend and had to go to the library to bring a book back, as I walked back towards them I noticed they were playing a game on their iPod even though I only took five minutes. We cant stop for a few minutes without reaching into our pockets and taking out a device which we could honestly live without if they were one day forbidden. When we cross roads or walk down streets we occupy ourselves with screens. With loud music playing through our headphones or by playing an addictive game, would we notice thief stealing from us? One thing we have to admit is that an imaginary world that was once non-existent easily distracts us from the real life that surrounds us. Not to mention that all our events, interests, images in the visual cyber universe are put on platform for everyone to see. Also our intellectual and political thoughts, our actions and our honesty are affected by this automatic self-alteration. The public view everything we do - are we alone when looking at our Facebook page or are there more people viewing our page at the same time? Its a chilling thought but we spend a lot of time online because we want to know certain information about our friends and we want to spread that information on to our other friends. Ferlosio (a Spanish essayist) once cited Time before, we did not look at things, we just saw them. Today all is wrapped in duplicity; no impulse is pure and direct. That is how the countryside has become a landscape, that is to say a representation of itself wherever I set my eyes, I see that terrible scenery that people glorify under the name of landscape " Perhaps one day, millions of years from now, the cyber world will have dissolved and mankind will have found something else to obsess over. I guess well never know.

In reality - we have become the screens

"We used to live in the imaginary world of the mirror, of the divided self and of the stage, of otherness and alienation. Today we live in the imaginary world of the screen, of the interface and the reduplication of contiguity and networks. All our machines are screens. We too have become screens, and the interactivity of men has become the interactivity of screens." Jean Baudrillard, Xerox & Infinity. This quote by Baudrillard states the absolute truth. We too have become screens just states how robotic we are to screens and how we relate to them with everything we do. This to us is the real, even though in a lot of ways it is anything but. We enter into a world of cyberspace where personalities can be made up and things can be said easier on screen than in person. And that is another reason why most of us live our lives on screen and in the world of cyberspace. It seems we've gotten ourselves caught in a web and we dont know how to get out. And will we get out? Not if technology continues to advance so quickly right before us. One-day things like voting, job interviews, purchasing automobiles, medical care and diagnostics will be executed while sitting in front of a screen. Some say that its an easier way of living, its harmless and safe but extremely powerful and convenient in a persons daily life. The thought of the web being a new start and a whole new planet or continent made it appealing to users thinking that they would get away from the real world for a few hours and explore another exciting different world but are we capable of crawling back into the real world? That is yet undecided.

At the Movies Cinema: The Real VS. The Unreal

Movies give the reimagined, reinvented version of the real. It may look like something familiar, but in actuality it is a different universe from the world of the real. This quote from the book Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies by Bell Hooks would in my opinion be an accurate perception. The only way to create an enactment of a moment in time is to have actually captured the real events and then shown them on screen. One must have lived to tell the tale of such events to have them depicted on screen. A filmmaker can indeed document events in their way but acting it out is NOT the same. But thats what makes movies so compelling and powerful. As Stan

Brakhage, a visionary filmmaker, once quoted All this slavish mirroring of the human condition feels like a bird singing in front of mirrors. The less a work of art reflects the world the more is being in the world and having its natural being like anything else. Film must be free from all imitations, of which the most dangerous is the imitation of life Brakhage has the point that it is critical to not imitate said occasions that people have witnessed or experienced but to tell the story in a more meaningful gripping way. We do not look at the television but TV looks at us. And because of this it prevents us from seeing and results in this fundamental alienation for anything given to be seen on screen. Through all media, things look at us frantically without us being able to see them. Corey extols the significance of fantasy even as he critiques the use of fantasy to escape reality another quote from Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies, as Hooks explains how Dorian Corey is fascinated with the concept of fantasy. Not everyone is happy living in reality, so fantasising about unreal things take us out of the ordinary and into the unordinary world of imagination. Most of us go to the cinema to experience another world, a fabricated imaginary world or a world that is full of entertainment but again wouldnt occur in real life. Often when we go to the cinema we come to learn things that we werent aware of before. In some ways, our opinions change or we are somewhat affected by the images we see on screen. In this age, popular culture constitutes a new sense of movement pulling away from what we already know and see everyday and entering a world that is so different and questionable for example movies like The Matrix and Inception both leave us thinking and questioning the real and the unreal. To quote from The Matrix itself as Morpheus questioned Neo - Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? My question being how would we know the difference between the real world and the world we see on screen? When we experience lucid dreams (as we often see happening in movies), we know we are dreaming and still have complete control over the dream. Lucid dreams seem a real as can be so what if one day we could not distinguish between our dreams and the real world? I have often remembered something at a random point in a day that I thought I did but wasnt too sure if it were a dream or not. If you cannot wake from your dream, how

would you know the difference between dream world and the real world? So how do we know the difference between what we see on screen and what we see in our everyday life?

An addiction we allow the public to view?

When we are looking at a screen the images we see are producing a feedback of realityeffect through a simulacrum of exchange. How do we break this circularity, how do we put our TVs aside for a few moments and live in the reality that surrounds us? Photographs reproduce what only happens once in a lifetime, you can observe repeatedly but that moment in time will never happen again. In a book called The Ecstasy of Communications (1988), written by Jean Baudrillard himself he discusses how we surrender ourselves in an ecstasy of communication. The mass media and the seductive television ads, films, magazines and newspapers that are portrayed non-stop. Of course we are hooked. The media think of new ways to draw our attention all the time, the fantasy attractive world that we see on screen for a few split seconds makes us think like those actors that we see in such films and magazines etc. We have to stop and think of the effects that the screens have on us. Instead of sitting down with a cuppa and grabbing the remote control, why not sit down and read a book or walk the dog or just distract yourself from the fascination and enchantment of the world of screens? Even switching off our mobile phones is a painful calamity! The luminous eyes of television and computer screens penetrate into our private spaces Baudrillard, 1988. Our secrets disappear and every image we absorb becomes more and more pornographic. We are thrusting all of our hobbies and likes into a Google search engine, which is just precarious. We turn on movies channels or sports channels and sit aimlessly watching a screen and ignoring whats going on outside or even in the household you live in. In an article based on Baudrillard by Douglas Kellner he declares that you are the screen and the television is watching you. The television sits there and looks at you with an invitation saying switch me on and without thinking we inevitably switch it on and look for something that can easily entertain us. The media circulate and disseminate a teeming network of cool, seductive and fascinating sights and sounds to

be plays on ones own screen and terminal. Why do we find such things alluring to the eye? This new age of screens has got us hooked and it is a wonder that we can tell a difference from the real and the dreamlike world that circulates our own essence. "The scene excites us, the obscene fascinates us", Kellner quotes Baudrillard. In this universe we become automatic when it comes to the illusory world of information, images, events, and ecstasies. In the media world the interspaced, meaning, privacy and the individualistic life is over. A new course of immorality, bewilderment and abruptness begins a postmodern world at the horizon.

The Fantasy World

In a book called Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction by John Storey, he mentions something in the first chapter (page nine) that I have taken note of and also agree with The texts and practices of popular culture are seen as forms of public fantasy. Popular culture is understood as a collective dream world. Popular culture provides escapism that is not an escape from or to anywhere, but an escape of our utopian selves. We think the same when we look on our screens. It is a dream world we live in when we spend so much time looking at screens. To look at the screens on our mobile phones, our iPods, and our computer screens - is sometimes used as an excuse to escape from the real world that we live in. Its a fantasy world that we see on screens. Think about all the games we have played and seen on screen. The Sims was always a getaway for myself and it is secretly a world that we would all prefer, even though the aim was to teach the player how to work hard at life and not revolve all their time partying. Games like The Sims are not real but we would all jump at the opportunity to breakaway from the real boring world and enter into a threedimensional, pseudo-world where all our dreams and delusions become irrefutable. What about movies? Do they resemble the real? People have rarely said out loud that ALWAYS happens to me! when watching a movie on a screen. Films are completely unrealistic and the plots barely coincide with real life experiences even though sometimes we think they do. So what about typical scenarios for e.g. opening the cabinet in the bathroom then closing it to find a mass-murderer looking at you from behind, but isnt in the room when you turn around? Another turning on the news

while having breakfast and without switching the channel, the news story is exactly relevant to your situation. Or another scene that I often see in movies getting to the airport in a mad hurry to stop a loved one from boarding a flight that will take them to a far away country and then never seeing them again if they do. These schemes NEVER happen in real life but we put ourselves in the characters shoes and ask what would I do? Films hardly ever show the real but I guess, wheres the fun in that?

The Youth and Screens

On page 54 of Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction something else that has obvious significance stands out to me. Hall and Whannel turn to questions of youth culture; they find it necessary to discuss the interaction between text and audience. Moreover, they recognise that to do full justice to the relationship, they have to include other aspects of teenage life: work, politics, the relation to the family, social and moral beliefs on so on. Pop music culture songs, magazines, concerts, festivals, comics, interviews with pop stars, films, etc. helps to establish a sense of identity among youth: What Storey is implying about the works of Hall and Whannel is that young people are always confronted with text and audiences when in school and university. And from a young age (and especially for the next generation of youth), all text will come from the Internet more than it will from books. In teenage life, as most of us know, the screen is a vital requirement in day-to-day activities. As Hall and Whannel comment on other aspects of teenage life, songs they listen to can be downloaded and then listened to through the use of a mobile phone, iPod and more. The same goes for magazines, books, films and shopping. Technology has changed young peoples lives but already too many of them have got caught up in the cant live without screens syndrome. So is the real what THEY see on screen? I would say yes, it is.

Hyperreality and Reality on Screen

In an online article named 308 Baudrillard: Fatal Strategies (1993) by an author, philosopher and lecturer called Rick Roderick, he refers to his own The Self Under

Siege. Roderick explains that Baudrillard thinks that reality is in the process of disappearing an interesting perspective on the real world. As children and even adults, we were taught and told about the things that were real, but why did we believe those who told us? How do we know what is real and what is not? And this is what Roderick tries to demonstrate. If technology had its way with us, it would be the computers unplugging us and not the other way around. The postmodern shows a fine line between human being and machines a line between reality and image. We are a world in which reality can be falsified, copied and even disguised. This is how Baudrillard describes the real which I want to go into more detail about. Another approach to Baudrillard is that of the Hyperreality. Hyperreality is defined as a mixture between what is real and what is fiction and therefore there is no clear distinction where one ends and the other begins. It is a philosophy in a postmodern society that deals with semiotics signs that surround people in everyday life and what they mean to us also. Reality is simply something we can make up or even pretend (for e.g. The Truman Show where Truman Burbank thinks he is living in the reality when in fact his whole life is a made up reality show and broadcasted to every TV set in America). Like in the movie A Clockwork Orange where the character Malcolm McDowell remarks how Its funny how blood isnt really blood until you viddy it on the screen; meaning how real blood looks on the screen compared to how it REALLY looks when we see it in up close. On screen, blood looks more real than real blood should look and this is the same sense of hyperreality we get when we go to the cinema. The same goes for popstars and celebrities. Madonna has learned to develop her skills by making herself to be more popular than popular, to have her popularity spoken about and thus being popular because of it. Madonna will never be a great singer or a great dancer as such but she understands that she has to continue her popularity within the hyperreal and stay that way, because unfortunately she has no more talent left to give.

Reality Shows: Scripted?

The culture provided by the commercial entertainment marketplays a crucial role. It mirrors attitudes and sentiments, which are already there, and at the same time

provides an expressive field and a set of symbols through which these attitudes can be projected. Storey expresses, watching commercials can portray certain attributes that will indeed affect us expressing attitudes and feelings just like films do to us. Commercials are even worse than films when it comes to what is real. The Special K ads where the woman in red loses weight and feels less bloated after eating the cereal over a couple of days thats not real, that again, is a dream. Other than commercials is another strategy adopted by television reality shows. Reality shows involving policemen chasing stolen cars like Super Troopers, Speeders, Jacked and COPS got a lot of attention with regard to them being false and scripted. COPS was reportedly called a fake show but the show took approximately 300 hours of footage to create one half hour episode with of course, the help of professional editing. Being a cop is not that lucrative and we follow them around because it is interesting. We asked the question then is this what reality look like? Is what were watching real or not? Hyperreality affects us across many different continuums and is built on the real. The hyperreal cannot exist without substances of pure reality in it.

Gameplay: Real Images and More

An ad that appeared on a website that I was viewing caught my eye the other day. First of all, it seemed to be just another game that you can play online (on a computer or any mini device). But when I looked into it I read that it was the most realistic golf game on the web. Chad Nelson is the President of World Golf Tour and he took real photographs of golf pitches and placed them into the game. I had a look on YouTube of the demo and was surprised at how real it was. The technology is very advanced and it is a unique game since the courses are real images so it is like you are really playing golf in the open air. The same goes for GTA IV where the cars, roads and buildings look SO real due to the considerable graphical, texture, and lighting effects in the game. I cant tell whether or not some of these images are real or unreal. You could definitely say that the GTAs relate to a lot of action movies with reference to the violence, action and realistic background noises and sounds. Its just amazing that technology has grown that fast that playing games online, on Xboxs, PlayStations, Nintendos and more feels like you are actually there, outside playing sport, feeling the cold weather while fighting etc. When we were younger we

played plenty of games, stayed indoors when the sun shone and even played multiplayer games. Now half of the games whether they include cars, racing, aliens can pretty much be seen in movies. Films that were extraordinarily impressive on a cinema screen like the Harry Potters, Jurassic Parks, Lord of the Rings and more always had magical and unimaginable things that are just not realistic. But what if you saw a real dinosaur tomorrow? Would you be disappointed because Spielberg has made them more frightening, enormous and monstrous and the dinosaur in front of you is pathetic and fragile?

Real life events and their connections to screens

Baudrillard wanted to discover the real and wanted to cover the Gulf war when he was offered a job by a French newspaper. He wanted to cover the news on CNN where it would really happen. No other broadcaster would be as daring to announce who won or lost so Baudrillard sat in a flat in Paris and experienced it for himself if thats not pure reality within hyperreality, then I dont know what is. Baudrillard commented that if anything is real, war is. It might sound pessimistic to us, since we havent acknowledged the war itself, but at least now we can connect reality and meaning and get a better understanding of the real. To feel passion and pain and to suffer loss and injuries is to have experienced the real and that is something many of us cannot come to terms with. The only understanding we have of war is the hyperreality of it on the TV. We can hear and see the explosions but it doesnt sound like that really. If we were really there, we would be deaf by now. Roderick even got in touch with someone in Durham who had been to war and he said that the smart bombs were just like those he saw in the arcade games and he felt that this was brilliant practise for the real thing. When he was younger he had spent endless hours playing those games and hes alive now isnt he? So what does that tell us? He didnt even think about the real and that he had actually been there and witnessed it but remembered how much tips he got off a game. This is an incredible story so I do think that the real comes from many things that we perceive on screens. I do think we are too connected with technology and screens but in the end, is it doing more good than bad to us?

Conclusion
The postmodern movement places us in a situation where drawing a line between the real and the unreal is not just a deep meaningful thought but also a typical day-to-day issue. We need to figure out what is real and what is truly make-believe. Is this sale a conspiracy or should I trust this salesman at my door? Baudrillard conveys that we have to look at the world as an opportunity to live in the real and let it give us something we never had before. Information technologies are forever changing and the human body is faced with machines every day. So from plastic surgery to artificial organs and implants to virtual reality where you can walk, talk, make friends and more. The struggles you see in reality, whereas on a screen all your troubles and worries vanish into thin air. This is technology, and technology is definitely real. Technology has not imprisoned us and it wont it is not a virus or a lethal weapon to which we obey and master. It is not imaginary or a camouflage it is our reality and every single one of us has been or will be correlated with technology one way or another. Its other things like the talk of places and the he said, she said spectacle that makes us brainwashed. The thought of Vegas makes us excited and enchanted, but we havent been there yet so how do we judge from the PhotoShopped images that suffocate the net? References:
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QUOTES FROM CULTURAL THEORY AND POPULAR CULTURE

PAGE 6 Charles Dickenss work. Similarly, film noir can be seen to have crossed the border supposedly separating popular and high culture: in other words, what started, as popular cinema is now the preserve of academics and film clubs.

PAGE 11 the people refers to everyone nor to a single group within society but to a variety of social groups which, although differing from one another in other respects (their class position or the particular struggles in which they are most immediately engaged), are distinguished from the economically, politically and culturally powerful groups within society and are hence potentially capable of being united PAGE 12 to examine the power relation that constitute this form of everyday life and thus reveal the configuration of interests its construction serves [Turner, 1996:6) ^ - The postmodern blurring of the distinction between authentic and commercial culture) can be found in the relationship between television commercials and pop music. PAGE 51 A determined effort must be made to counteract the debasement of standards which result from the misuse of press, radio, cinema and television... it calls especially upon those who use and control the media of mass communication, and upon parents, to support the efforts of teachers in an attempt to prevent the conflict which too often arises between the values inculcated in the classroom and those encountered by young people in the world outside (quoted in Hall and Whannel, 1964: 23) PAGE 53 (Q.D. Leavis) If we wish to re-create a genuine popular culture we must seek out the points of growth within the society that now exists. PAGE 54 The main focus of The Popular Arts is on the textual qualities of popular culture. However, when Hall and Whannel turn to questions of youth culture they find it necessary to discuss the interaction between text and audience. Moreover, they recognise that to do full justice to the relationship, they have to include other aspects of teenage life: work, politics, the relation to the family, social and moral beliefs on so on. This of course begs the question why this is not also necessary when other aspects of popular culture are discussed. Pop music culture songs, magazines, concerts, festivals, comics, interviews with pop stars, films, etc. helps to establish a sense of identity among youth: ^- PAGE 64 Today anyone who in incapable of talking in the prescribed fashion, is threatened in his very existence suspected of being an idiot or an intellectual Adorno points out, mass culture is a difficult system to challenge.