HOLLA! Eco

The City of Robots was a fascinating reading because a lot of the places Umberto Eco discussed and examined are places I’ve been to a few times. For example, I’ve grown up with Disney World and have been there probably over 30 times in my 20 years. The fact that Eco discusses ‘realness’ is interesting because when you go to places like Disney World you are made to believe and know it is not real but everything couldn’t seem more real. Eco states, “The houses of Disneyland are full-size on the ground floor, and on the two-thirds scale on the floor above, so they give the impression of being inhabitable (and they are) but also of belonging to a fantastic past that we can grasp with our imagination. The Main Street facades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing” (202). Disney wants you to believe that individuals are not in a real world and spending money to buy these Disney based goods and candies are all apart of the experience. It is funny how your real money is still useful in a world that to individuals is fake, make believe, and not real, yet we still see it as real. Another statement to go along with what was just previously said about spending your money at places like Disneyland is, “What is falsified in our will to buy, which we take as real, and in this sense Disneyland is really the quintessence of consumer ideology” (202). The fact that we as consumers even buy into fantasy is almost a sense of reality in some ways. The fact that Disney World and Disneyland are ‘fantasy lands’ and we as individuals know this, “Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can” (203). We have become almost spoiled by these falsified cities that the real is no longer as fulfilling as the fantasy.