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.

Nate Dogg 10/3

I liked the lecture with Zizek and the Baudrillard discussion as well. I think they both share a lot in common, specifically with Zizek's thoughts on 9/11 and Baudrillards excerpts regarding "the masking of nature". Looking at what television watching citizens observed on 9/11, it's puzzling as to why we never saw any blood or gruesome images. The prevention of showing these images only serves to cover up what happened, to shy away from the truth due to how graphic the images were. I think that this is where a modern day terrorism becomes so successful in it's goal, where its destruction and impact are so large that we aren't even able to see the whole picture. They understand the rules that television stations abide by and exploit that weakness, knowling that the sole image on television for weeks and weeks would be the image of their destructive work.
It circumstances like these, it becomes evident that television stations presume the national audience to be extremely afraid of death and dying. I believe that they are correct in their assumptions. The obsession with 9/11 and the struggle to understand why those events took place will always carry with it the idea that we are afraid of death, because of what was or was not shown on television after the bombing happened. That entire day, specifically the way it was handled by big media, speaks to the power the television set and the internet have over the masses. I think that journalistic ethics are going to play a large part in the transformation of traditional news and media coverage to a video/twitter style news coverage, and it’s going to be very soon that we are face to face with decisions regarding censorship. I think that living in a digital world, with digital news and digital opinions, keeping nature unmasked will only become far more difficult.

10/03, Serendipity

One of the most interesting quotes this class was one by Baudrillard. He states "the media are part of the even, they are part of the terror" (229). This rings very true especially in todays war obsessed culture. I had never thought of this as being the case, but there are many examples. The first one was brought up in class. It was the example of terrorist signs being in English and not in their native language. They are relying on the media to get their messages out there, and the media is falling into the trap and broadcasting it. By broadcasting hate and negativity, even though it is "reality", the media are absolutely part of the event and part of spreading terror. Even when people are holding signs, holding strikes in the streets, the most exciting part, and the sign that it is indeed a good strike, is when the media arrive to broadcast it. If the media refused to broadcast hate crimes, strikes, and terrorist acts then we would not know what is happening in the world. Unfortunately, the only way to do so is through this broadcasting unless you are actually physically THERE, and this is where the message gets skewed and the media actually turn into a medium where hate is carried through. It is a dillema, which one is worse, not knowing what is "really" happening (its not totally real because everyone would be acting differently and doing different things if the camera crews were not present), or realizing what we watch is not completely true, if at all, and that the video camera essentially is bringing more terror and hate into the world.

Gwatter06, 10/4

This week in class we went a bit more in depth with Baudrillard and his theoretical perspectives. The first thing I was able to notice was the connection between Zizek’s notion of what’s real and Baudrillard notion of reality. The quote by Baudrillard set us off for our class discussion in asking, “Does reality actually outstrip fiction?” What I found most interesting is that there was a split in the class in who felt that fiction is actually more real than reality. I took the opposed faction in this argument. I believe that although reality has unrealistic properties and at times is an actual façade of the real, such as images and instruments that mirror or copy reality, fiction is still fiction and realism still exist within reality. What I mean by this is that, fiction is meant to be fake, but reality, although we have already determined can be fake in the sense that it is scripted or not sincere, still contains entities of realism. These entities are the people, objects and situations that entail what we define as reality. We also went over an interesting quote from Baudrillard in preparation for the test in where Baudrillard states, “Disneyland exists in order to hide the fact that it is the “real” country…Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.” I believe this quote entails Baudrillard’s notion of the real vs. reality instilling his concept of simulacra he explains that Disney is the representation of something that is not actually there. It represents this utopian era of life that in “reality” does not exist. It is a façade for enterprise that society tends to be drawn too, sometimes in an attempt to escape reality through virtual reality. This relates to what Dorfman in how he explains that Disney’s aura of a utopian perfection will lead to children’s misperception of life. I believe this example personifies our trouble with the distinction of reality vs. fiction and so on.

Captain Outrageous, 10/4

I find the topic of reality and truth hard to deal with. There's always a truth and a reality beyond what we know. I feel that our lives have such a large majority of it spent "looking" that it is hard for us to "see". I only just realized this and it makes perfect sense. We are a technological generation: ipods, cell phones, high definition TV, 3D movies so on and so forth. We spend so much time plugged into the views of others that the view of reality can’t be anything but hard to come by. Reality is constructed for us on a continuous basis. How often do we take the time to thinking critically about what we’ve just seen on TV or in a movie? Maybe we consider the characters, the plot, but we never consider the universe we’ve been put into or who is behind it. I understand that is what we do in this class but doesn’t it seem like it should go further? The concepts that we cover in this class go beyond their general classifications and examples, this is reality. Wait. I think so. The reality is that reality is blurred. The truth is that there is no truth, truthfully. What does it MEAN when a TV show or a movie says “BASED ON REAL LIFE EVENTS” or “BASED ON A TRUE STORY” ? What does it MEAN when something is reviewed as “realistic” or the most “truthful” telling of a story? According to who?! Here’s the truth about reality and the reality about the truth: Its a big fat stinky onion. It makes you cry, it goes bad when its left out for too long, but most importantly, its made of lots and lots of layers. Its hard to work through the tears to peel it apart.

BiegieGo, 10/4

Does reality actually outstrip fiction? In our last class discussion our class decided that reality does outstrip fiction. We came up with some examples such are reality being scripted such as the director setting up a scene to take place to make the show better which leads to having a better plot in the story and ultimately having it all in a framed show such as “The real world, or even in different cities such as Las Vegas or Disneyland.” We can take the computer game called the “Sims” and analyzes it. this is a game that you can build a fake world on the computer were only you are in control of what kind of life you want to live weather its having a lot of money to living simple. This goes back to the last theorist we read about vertical reality. Baudrillard explains to us that there a success phases of the image were we can look at an image and tell if something is being mask or the truth of the image is absent or if it even has any relation to the real.
Our class was presented to images of war and dead soldiers. What if we were presented with images of fake cities? Images of cities such as Las Vegas “the world of gambling” or even Disney world “the world of fantasies?” I was just reading the article “The City of Robots.” It tells about how Las Vegas is the city of gambling and how it’s becoming more residential and then it goes into describing California’s Disneyland and it talks a little about Florida’s Disney world. while I was reading I wasn’t really thinking clear but after reading about how Disney makes the rides like robots I was thinking that maybe not only the rides of Disney are robotic but the people who go and consume this kind of entertainment are also like robots in a way. We go to these theme parks to be entertained by fake things, the imitation of the real. Why are humans so compelled to want to be entertained by the fake? Why do we spend so much money on fake fantasies?

Mongoose 10/4

The early focus of our lecture with Slavoj Zizak was the topic of “what is truth”, how do we know what is true? Is there actually ‘truth’ or do we construct truth out of what happens around us? This is a topic that ties right into Baudrillard’s writing on reality; he presents to us the question “does reality actually outstrip fiction?” (228) By this question he is wondering if reality has actually become more fictional than fiction. At first this idea sounds absolutely preposterous, and I was one of the few who argued that fiction is more fictional than reality, but upon further review I can definitely understand where he is coming from and what he means by this. A lot of this depends on what one is actually referring to as “reality”; if we are talking about day to day interactions and lived experiences, then reality is definitely not fictional, however if we are talking about “reality” TV there can absolutely be an argument for it being more fictional. In these programs (Big Brother, The Hills etc.) there is a definite argument that the notion of reality has disappeared altogether with these characters, there are obvious scripted moments, plotlines etc, all things which we associate with fictional programming. Very few people watch these shows and think, ‘wow this is just like my life’. On the other hand, there are many fictional shows which people watch and get a definite sense of reality and a feeling that the issues, characters presented are very much like what their lives are. So if presented again with the question ‘which is more real, reality or fiction?’ I would have to clarify what the individual asking the question was referring to as ‘reality’ before being able to provide the correct answer to this question. Going back to Zizak, how can one really know what reality is unless you have experienced this reality for yourself?

FloRida, 10/4

This whole idea about reality truly continues to interest me. I think it is because I can understand through things that happen in everyday life. Watching television, hanging out with friends, posters that are up around campus all relate to the concepts of reality that we have been studying in class. When the class was asked if what we think is reality is the real reality or is the fiction the reality. These questions that were posed can appear to be somewhat confusing…which they are. A majority of the class viewed the reality as false. Baudrillard asks, “Does reality actually outstrip fiction?” If the answer is yes, (which most of the class answered), then this means that reality has become more fictional than real. This could be because the media portrays our “reality” as scripted with plots and frames. Fiction is more controlled and something that is watched. The powerpoint that we went over describing the successive phases of the image really struck me with interest. I was so unaware of the actual significance of how a picture is portrayed and the different ways it could be viewed. The image with the caskets covered in American Flags looked like it would be viewed as the reality. When we were told that according to Baudrillard it would be considered masked and denaturing reality, it was eye opening. These ideas of good images, evil images, sorcery, and simulacric honestly made so much sense in my mind. At first simulacra kind of confused me but when Dr. Rog explained it through the example of Johnny Rockets. Whenever I go to places that represent different time periods I always feel like I actually know what the time period was like, even though I never lived through it. I believe this notion of simulacra occurs through images we see, stories we are told, and media representation.