T101 Media Life

Media LifeInleiding Mediacultuur I 12 The Matrix [options]

#medialife #IMCI

Intermezzo: what about the media industries? short essays by Acland, Hesmondhalgh, Napoli, Deuze, Kraidy, Maxwell, and Wasserman in Issue 1 and 2 ( of volume 1) of the Media Industries Journal (2014)

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options in media life

war against the machines

surrender to mediated reality

become media (and hack life)

change4life literacy commercial UK3

INTERVIEWER Why do you feel that Trumans never come close to discovering the true nature of his world? CHRISTOF We accept the reality of the world with which were presented.

http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the-truman-show_shooting.html7

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Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)

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10/8/1510Matrix 1.12 The Real World

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of Empire, but of ours. The desert of the real itself.

10/8/1511Matrix 1.12 The Real World

...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigors of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.Jorge Luis Borges (1946)

Everything is a copy of a copy. Everything is a code, or a model, or a representation. In todays society, people even create models of themselves, using programs such as Second Life. Even with technology, such as Instant Messaging, people are modeling real conversation with people. In a sense, everything in the world is no longer real because everything has already happened. All things that happen, for example demonstrations are just simulations of ones that have happened before. At this point, there is just an indefinite number of simulations constantly occurring, even if people think they are real. This story emphasizes the idea of no reality in a chilling story of a world literally taken over by the model.

source: http://english149-w2008.pbworks.com/Jayne+Goldsmith,+%22Borges%27+On+Exactitude+in+Science%22:+Modeling+the+Model

ORIGINAL:http://www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/bu/people/bs/borges.html12

living in maps; augmented reality13

Jean Baudrillards critique of The Matrix:its classical, Platonic treatment

The Matrix is the Platonic treatment of reality: as an illusion mistaken for reality

Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of the cave entrance, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

link PRISONERS with PANTOPTICON

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The Matrixis surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.

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simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal

Matrix 1.15 Morpheus/Neo Matchup16

the more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure

10/8/1517TM: The Matrix Reloaded suggests that Zion is a system anomaly that needed to be maintained in order for the system to work at all. Choice is just another part of the mechanism of control.

M2.10 What is Control?M2.30 The Ones Function

a Matrix-based reality cannot be fundamentally altered, as even Neo ultimately turns out to be just another inevitable part of the program.so what can you do in a reality that cannot be changed by references to that reality?

10/8/1518TM: Ultimately, the system fails when it tries to incorporate Neo back into the system in order to achieve total control. The message: we can all become programmers (or: gods)

M3.30

According to Baudrillard, we will continue to be seduced by appearances - it is inevitable. Individual enlightenment is just another form of control.

Baudrillards answer: theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left to us

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We begin to become aware of just how much of our reality is open source and up for discussion.Douglas Rushkoff 10 September 2003

Douglas Rushkoff: http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/opensourcedemocracy220

if we really want to change reality, then we have to try and do something different.

Dream: ethical spectacle 2007

What do Paris Hilton, Grand Theft Auto, Las Vegas, and a McDonalds commercial have in common with progressive politics? Not much. And, as Stephen Duncombe brilliantly argues, this is part of whats wrong with progressive politics. According to Duncombe, cultureand popular fantasycan help us define and actualize a new political aesthetic: a kind of dreampolitik, created not simply to further existing progressive political agendas but help us imagine new ones.Dream makes the case for a political strategy that embraces a new set of tools. Although fantasy and spectacle have become the lingua franca of our time, Duncombe points out that liberals continue to depend upon sober reason to guide them. Instead, they need to learn how to communicate in todays spectacular vernacularnot merely as a tactic but as a new way of thinking about and acting out politics. Learning from Las Vegas, however, does not mean adopting its values, as Duncombe demonstrates in outlining plans for what he calls ethical spectacle.An electrifying new vision of progressive politics by a lifelong political activist and thinker, Dream is a twenty-first-century manifesto for the left, reclaiming the tools of hidden persuaders in the name of spectacular change.

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are you someone who is ''in [] the reality-based community, [believing] that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality?

or

someone who believes that when we act, we create our own reality?writer/former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind talking with Karl Rove, senior adviser to President Bush in The New York Times magazine, 17 October 2004