Basic thesis of essay

[and opening paragraph]
The world we live in, increasingly virtualised by technological developments, presents us with a playing field where rules are turned swiftly on their heads, in a structure whose very flexibility makes it easily subvertable. The advancing omnipresence of the Internet and technologies surrounding it play a large part in this virtualising process. As the physical, social, political, cultural and financial world becomes virtualised, the virtual world seems to become more “real”. Subsequently, we accept and subvert the world around us simultaneously; in an echo of Jean Baudrillard’s ideas about a self-referential, closed-circuit simulation of reality, one begets the other, until the two are indivisible.

Got about 600 words so far, but worried because so far I'm still sort of on introductions; not sure how I'm gonna fit the ideas into the essay, Of course on the other hand I might just completely run out of ideas halfway through... but let's hope not.

more essay planning

CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS:

GEN: i've typed things up under the headings of finance, celebrity, movies, tv, cyberspace - - cyberspace is the most expansive one, encompasses blog sites, myspace, messageboards, music piracy/filesharing, and somewhere in that, i'll discuss language as well, how it gets subverted and modified through internet usage.obviously some of these cross over - celebrity crosses over with tv and cyberspace, very definitely.

CHRIS: id group together myspace/forums/blogs as selfpublishing or something.

GEN: myspace, for me, is ordinary people's ability not so much to self-publish, but to self-publicise - to flatten themselves into an abbreviated, concise form; to reduce themselves to summaries, stereotypes, two dimensional beings, just like 'celebrities' [as opposed to the people behind the sleb veneer - but those people are inevitably affected by their veneer, it is integrated into their personalities, and in the worst cases [i.e. extreeeme divas], replaces them, they become simulacra] - an attempt, subconscious or otherwise, to simplify themselves and perhaps thus understand themselves/be understood.

[...Simplifying themselves in the face of a culture of information overload? We have access to more information about ourselves and each other than we've ever had; is this two-dimensionalising an attempt to make sense of it all?]

...And to satisfy their egos - to design themselves, in cyberspace, as their ideal selves rather than the splintered, faulty selves they're forced to accept in 'reality' - much like gameplayers who use avatars [hindu origin - ultimate supreme being, related to vishnu, the divinity who comes down to earth in human form, equatable with christ] to represent them, and choose the traits of these avatars rather than organically developing them/having them from birth. so both are a way of bypassing reality; rules no longer apply.

but then maybe people's human interaction with each other WITHIN the social networking space - responding to each other's profiles, affects them; like people are upset when they get unkind comments on their pictures, even though these pictures are just 2D representations that they've chosen to show a particular side of themselves [literally and metaphorically] - that comment, to some people, is not about the picture, it's about THEM, directly affects self-esteem. they cheat reality by presenting themselves in a selective way, but are cheated in turn by real behaviour in that virtual space, and accept that behaviour as being directed at their real selves, not their virtual selves.
so yr online identity BECOMES part of yr real identity, no longer a willed, subversive act, but an accepted, involuntary part of you.

actually i do think years of social internet usage definitely affects one's personality/social behaviour; one interacts socially online where, or in a way that, they might not in a physical space. this experience affects their mental/social development just as social experiences in a physical environment do. though given my limited time, i can probably only hypothesise this, rather than offer solid proof of it.

CHRIS: oooooooooooh thats good shit.as a person im massively influenced by the internet. like my sense of humour is very heavily influenced by spending too much time talking to americans on make out club when i was a wee teen

also, i still think you should choose a word other than abbreviate, compress maybe? and relate linguistic abbreviation to this. abbreviation sounds completely wrong.

also: re people being offended by bad image comments, theres the fact that, say, I CHOSE to put that pictre up, so an insult to the picture is an insult to my judgement.

GEN: i'm gonna research the word abbreviate thoroughly... right now it feels instinctually exactly the word i'm looking for, cos i like the idea of people as texts [barthes/derrida, everything is a text and can be analysed as such], as words, ideograms, strings of information and subsequent meaning, that can be analysed and altered just like language, person as expression, a person's presentation of themselves altering their meaning. but i do need to research this, cos it could well end up looking really stupid and discrediting my point. As to abbreviation vs compression - the point is that information isn't just squashed, it's actually lost, just as, when abbreviating a word, you jettison parts of it and alter its shape completely.

essay thoughts

Feeling a bit lost with the essay - lots of things I'm interested in exploring, but a bit worried I'll go off on innumerable tangents and not actually argue a point.
Things I'm thinking about for inclusion:

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‘Real’ can be opposed to (or set in contrast with) ‘fake’ or ‘illusion’. HOW has the development of cyberspace [CS] (or other recent technological innovations) made us RETHINK the oppositions between real/ fake and real/ illusory?

(You might also consider the question: to what extent has CS made us rethink the distinction between 'original' and 'copy.')
---------------------------------------------------------------

REAL - LACAN, BAUDRILLARD
ILLUSION - NIETZSCHE, BAUDRILLARD

OPPOSITIONS BETWEEN - swallowing each other up?

ORIGINAL & COPY - simulacra - remind self of the four stages of an image:

reflection of reality
mask over reality - "denatures" it [baudrillard]
void mask - hides absence of reality
simulacrum - bears no relation to ANY reality - relates to nothing but itself

read baudrillard's clones

MOVIES:

SOLARIS - reality replaced by simulacra - in a strange, disembodied environment, dead loved ones return, formed not from factual remnants but from memories - memories that could well be distorted [think about nostalgia - BAUDRILLARD & NOSTALGIA] - the illusory yet "real" [physical, sentient] loved ones that present themselves could actually bear no relation to their originals, and are at any rate not complete, formed only from what their companions remember - no self construction, only formed from external sources [LACAN - objectified self, conception of the external]. Yet they're all their companions have left of them - not remnants though, but created anew to torment them. [Is their self-awareness of their own incompleteness, and the means of their existence, relevant?]

THE MATRIX - within this cyberreality, people can achieve the impossible, armed only with unwavering self-belief and training [both a celebration of the American dream, and a critique of the limitations of the life this dream has brought about]; they can become the superhuman of Nietzschean ideology if they try; also brings up Borg-esque insectoid collective mentality on the part of the antagonists [discussed by Zizek] - one consciousness transferred and shared liquidly between agents who exist both in the "real world" and "matrix".

TV:

NEWS - Media technology, instant relay of information, closed circuit of information? [baudrillard]
- 9/11, it happened so we displayed it, movies displayed it so it happened... chicken/egg syndrome, which was the original, which was the copy?
- DIANA, 'the people's princess' a tag devised by the media [tabloid headlines?], not by the actual people - media PRESUMES to speak for the people, and thus replaces them...
- ...debate panels of people we don't personally know set up to represent us, voxpops that speak for public opinion, when public opinion itself is/should be a mass of shifting, opposing opinions - but do we take on the opinions fed to us? when all facts are imparted, interpreted/summarised and understood on our behalf, do we need to think, and formulate our own opinions?
- if the people as a truly receptive/active body no longer exist, the media speaks only to itself in an endlessly self-referential loop.

CYBERSPACE:

- livejournal
- myspace
- internet messageboards
- online gaming/roleplaying

LIVEJOURNAL.COM - most prevalent example of diary sites, where protagonists document - most commonly - their own lives, observed and participated in [via comments, and interaction with other, "befriended" journals] by others.
- Breeding ground for many an injoke, sparked by the nature of evolution of internet language [acronyms, creative spelling, commonly used phrases, ironic typos [e.g. oh my god!!1!1one] - circularity of injokes [they beget themselves] - large part of internet culture in general - massive, ironic, cynical self-awareness.
- Gave birth to the injokey-yet-taken-far-too-seriously [?] phenomenon of "ljdrama" [of which there is now even - inevitably - an official community] - he-said-she-said arguments, into which various users are inevitably drawn in, based on something written in someone's journal and seen by unintended eyes. See internet messageboards.
-Communities spring up for likeminded people - sometimes local communities, supplanted to an online, digital, cyberspace; more often though, linked by interests, social networking, common problems. Social groups are frequently formed from group members - meetups take place, friendships are formed on the basis of the comradeship established online. Typical examples include:
- creative communities, where participants all engage in similar creative activities and share these online;
- support groups, e.g. anorexia, self-harm;
- local "scene" groups, e.g. London indie scene, DC punk/hardcore scene, moviegoers in a particular area;
- fans of bands/films/'celebrities' [icons?]/other cultural phenomena; -->
--> and a recent and increasingly popular breed, fan-fiction - written about the object of fans' admiration, where the "icon" [already a two-dimensional projection on the part of his admirers - and this most frequently occurs with actors, or specifically, characters within a fiction, e.g. cult tv dramas] is placed within a further fictional setup, and made to play out the notions and fantasies of his/her fans. In some cases this is merely dramatic and narrative, in others it reaches into the realms of the erotic.

MYSPACE - social networking tool, seen by some frequent internet users as a step on from blog sites - one can maintain a blog as part of a more integrated and dynamic profile.
- The basis is on briefer, snappier communication - photos, bulletins that are sent to all of one's contacts. Baudrillard'd have a lot to say about it - bulletins fill up people's pages, saying nothing - people send bulletins to announce their state of boredom - their lack of anything to actually say.
- Myspace photos - the most cliched take photography to its most two-dimensional limits - high-contrast, Photoshop-edited self-photography, in which you only ever see a user's "good side", one half of their face, tilted and angled flatteringly and archly. Doesn't even pretend to represent reality - but does this make people FAKE, or merely show them experiementing with the different identities the site makes possible?

MESSAGEBOARDS - like lj communities, users are drawn together based on common interests; collective and personal relationships are formed; arguments are played out via the constructed medium of the messageboard [and does the chosen layout - threaded, inline etc - affect the discourse?] - users' use of the media is often woven into the content of the argument. Peacemaking users attempt to calm arguments saying "it's not worth arguing about, because it's only the internet" - the implication being, the space is not real, therefore neither is the argument.
- Infamous, somewhat tasteless internet image, often thrown sardonically into internet messageboard arguments: http://www.viperalley.com/gallery/data/502/109argue.jpg [slogan: "Arguing on the internet is like running in the Special Olympics - even if you win, you're still retarded"
- Interestingly, it's now been reinvented, and claimed as a political tool - http://justoneminute.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/bush_special_iraq.jpg ["Starting a war in Iraq is like running in the Special Olympics..."
http://www.freedominion.ca/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=29591 - messageboard conversation about it on a Republican messageboard
http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2004/week42/ - ...but elsewhere, speculation that it was a Republican trick to smear Democrats.
Interesting how an initially "geeky", intendedly humorous [though offensive] internet joke has become a political phenomenon in the "real world", and implicated politicians who may not even personally use the messageboards where this kind of image regularly appears [most frequently on pop-culture/gaming/technology boards where the boards' setup allow the inclusion of users' code and images, and the userbase is highly self-aware and self-referential].

Solaris, Syracuse and simulacra

Looking at the new essay questions, number 16 is appealing:
‘Real’ can be opposed to (or set in contrast with) ‘fake’ or ‘illusion’. How has the development of cyberspace [CS] (or other recent technological innovations) made us rethink the oppositions between real/ fake and real/ illusory? (You might also consider the question: to what extent has CS made us rethink the distinction between 'original' and 'copy.') I think I'll probably attempt that one or the earlier question about cultural icons.

I just caught the second half of Solaris, Stephen Soderbergh's American remake of the Russian film of the 70s. It was pretty intriguing, I'd like to see the original, and read the Stanislaw Lem book that inspired it. I was interested in the film's exploration of ideas about reality: the reality of the world and people around us, and of ourselves; the part our memories play in defining and historically preserving reality and the form of our lives. It's not a theme that could have been well explored in a sensational, typically 'Hollywood' film; the effect would have been crass and not a little superficial.

It follows a psychologist sent to investigate astronauts' odd visions aboard a space station orbiting the oceanic planet of the film's title; their dead loved ones appear to them, seemingly real and sentient. In turn, his dead wife (suicide) turns up and they resume their relationship, faced with numerous dilemmas: that not only he, but she also, knows she's not real, but a facsimile of his wife, yet she feels and experiences like a human . . . that she is not a complete person, but constructed only from what he remembers - and what if he remembers her wrong? (this plays into notions of simulacra, that if his memories are inaccurate, he's in love with an illusion that bears no relations to the woman who informed her existence) . . . that he remembers her as suicidal, and thus she still is, and tries to kill herself but, being a phenomena rather than a human, is resurrected and forced to continue her unintentional existence . . . and that he cannot bring her back to Earth, yet can live no kind of decent life on the space station.

The pace of Solaris - what I saw of it, at least - lets one think about the ideas present while the film slowly unfolds. A line towards the end particularly intrigued me: "I performed all the millions of gestures that constitute life on Earth. But I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong... that I was wrong about everything."

Took some reading on holiday; am now halfway through Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation; his writing style made it very difficult to get into, but it seems to get easier as you progress with it. Some interesting points about the circular nature of simulation; how, once you dispose of meaning, and are left only with signifiers, they consume and refer to each other endlessly rather than leading to any kind of outcome (e.g. the repetitious & increasingly meaningless process of communication, without any meaning actually being communicated, also documented by Richard Sennett regarding high-risk office-based workplaces - ad agencies etc - in his analysis of the modern employment culture, The Corrosion Of Character.) He also makes interesting points about consumer culture, and the illusory "needs" that are produced for us to pursue.

Also read Susan Sontag's Regarding The Pain Of Others. A key quote from it - "The problem is not that people remember the photographs, but that they remember only the photographs" - quite an accurate summation of one of the key problems with news coverage [say for instance 9/11; we think of two images that were hammered home - the slomo, shaky-video destruction of the WTC, and Osama Bin Laden's face - and other aspects fade into obscurity, like the other plane that was supposedly shot down near Washington, or the events involving the Middle East and Osama Bin Laden that preceded the terrorism, etc.]

On holiday, I found something else, quite different, that felt quite relevant. I visited an archeological park in Syracuse, which houses Roman and Greek stone outdoor theatres. I took some photos, a couple are below. The stone seats of the Greek theatre, having corroded in places, are being replaced with wooden boarded seats, painted grey to match the stone. The effect is peculiar to say the least.... the preservation of the theatre, and of the experience of the theatre - sitting on the seats, looking down into the semi-circular stage area - being preserved by thoroughly incongruous wooden seats.



That said, they are a temporary amendment, not the same as filling in the seats with fresh stone and contaminating its historical relevance and accuracy - but this whole debate, over the preservation of history, is one that the likes of Baudrillard have discussed, in relation to simulation.



Elsewhere, fallen pillars from the Roman amphitheatre were arranged prettily to line a path at the fee-paying entrance. The effect was rather trite; the pillars were no longer authentic evidence of an ancient culture, left where they fell to be observed in later centuries, but Roman-themed ephemera that made up the modern aesthetic structure of this museum piece, clambered over by tourists.

Essay starting points

Themes

• History/end of/stasis
• News
• Images
• Simulacra
• Culture that simulates rather than lives
• Failure to create real narrative (symptomatic of culture; of structure of media corporations?) ---> news is increasingly desperate to do this every day though long-term it fails - creates stories rather than reports them - all we remember are "iconic images" devoid of any sophisticated/informed/real narrative meaning, and the then omnipresence of certain stories

Reference points

• Baudrillard (various)
• Nietzsche (various)
• Barthes (Camera Lucida)
• Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others)
• Fukuyama (End of History & the Last Man)
• Sennett (Corrosion of Character)
• Foucault (Power)
• Belsey
• The Day Today
• Broken News
• Current newspapers
• Archived/online news
• Twin Towers reportage - THAT photo/footage, simplification of the issue to The War On Terror, elimination of the history that led up to it- the most significant simulacrum of recent times?

(TV) news' use of images

• - "exclusive pictures" - what do they say, do they form, facilitate or illustrate a story?
• our reaction to images - (sontag/baudrillard) - apathy, blurring of perceptions between real and simulated/reproduced
• images as propaganda - (barthes) - photo escapes semiotic laws - decontextualised quote, simulacra - easily used, perverted/manipulated
• obsession with a moment- replayed over & over, history never created, time frozen at that image and not moving forward, use of moments to split up the linear, continuous progression of time into eras, landmarks etc
• news jargon - frequent news-speak ("seminal moment", overuse of the word iconic, limited vocabulary etc), use of images as jargon, interchange of words and images as the two merge

Empty communication - (sennett) - in the corporate workplace, particularly in the media environment, simulation replaces achievement, work, progress; jargon facilitates the replacement of responsible, direct, tangible authority with flexible, slippery, 'amoral' leadership/teamwork

Post-modern condition - absurdity, chaos, abandonment of knowledge for its own sake; info collated for short-term gains, constantly reorganised for its own sake and that of "freedom" and "flexibility"; images favoured for their immediate impact, for surface communication and their pliability of "meaning".

Photo - Barthes & Berger

Basically rendered images often more instantly recognisable than a photo - fewer details for the mind to process, so the brain picks up immediately on the recognisable attributes that define the image.
Comparisons between Van Gogh's shoes painting and a logo of some trainers - Van Gogh's image represents a particular pair of shoes, and the fact he painted them imbues them with some meaning, backed up by the environment they're painted in. Logo presents nothing but a basic representation - some shoes, not "these" shoes. Has no referent.

Barthes

• essence of photographic image is its necessary inclusion of a referent. The objects documented within it are always realistic, detailed copies, not vague outlines.
• you can never skip beyond the real thing represented in it to cut straight to the concept; you remain anchored in the world. referent is inescapable.
  - BUT - what about 'abstract' photography? where the camera is used to 'draw' an indistinguishable form? e.g. light trails, blurring, etc - to the point where that's all the image is composed of, abstract presence of light and colour - where's the referent then?
• studium - everything in a photo that reflects typical cultural knowledge, cliches, stereotypes etc.
• punctum - element of surprise in a photo that punctures this bubble of comfortable, self-perpetuating complacency. E.G. Nicaraguan revolution photo with nuns crossing road - why are the nuns, the image's punctum, there? Because they are. Because they happened to be there; they don't fit our preconceived notions of what should be in the photo, but there they are anyway. And their presence recontextualises the whole image, provides an extra layer of REAL reality to an image that already supposedly documents reality.
• photo declares referent's - this - existence at a particular time - this has been. Photos make history instant - they cut out passage of time's middle man. Stops the flow of time - says "this is no longer" but also brings what was into the present. Preserves the past, but unlike a painting, can't present direct ideas about the future.

Berger

• perception of the image is based on what we know about it - photo is an empty, instantly-made image, not a memory complete with surrounding context, nor a painting, constructed from a complex series of authorial decisions.
• captures ONE isolated moment; WYSIWYG. Furthermore it has no language, unlike drawing; no sense of process; it quotes rather than translates, and therefore like any quote, is open to manipulation and different interpretations.
• "all photos are of the past but a photo arrests the past so it can never move forward" - Berger... --> Baudrillard and Fukuyama's end of history.

Photos perceived to be facts - but they aren't - facts must have context, cause & effect, etc - photo just captures one instant, one slice of the complete truth, which could be typical or anomalous for all we know.

The painting was a series of judgments and decisions. Photo

Graffiti as Sign

Themes

• ownership
• anarchy/freedom
• subversion
• assertion of identity

Graffiti provides a free mode of communication - writing being potentially anonymous. Therefore if the writer is unidentified, its message transcends the authorship of one individual; anyone could have written it, and everyone can see it. Mass communication at street level.

Prohibited sign-making - unauthorised, vandalism, the public/anarchic seizing of a space that isn't sanctioned for marking.

Subversion - culture jamming [Naomi Klein - No Logo] - reclamation of paid-for media outlets/ad spaces to sabotage/subvert a commercial message - "screwing up the system from the inside" as Courtney Love might put it.

• Sony - walls paid for and adorned with fake graffiti to sell a product - shown up for what it was by disgusted locals who scrawled "stop hawking corporate products on our neighbourhood" across the "graffiti".
• Occupational culture jammers - sabotage advertisements, online and across city billboards, turning slogans and brand ideologies on their heads, often humorously... seek to make people cynical about advertising
  
  [click to enlarge]
  http://www.adbusters.org/
  http://www.abrupt.org/CJ/CJ.html
  http://www.sniggle.net/ ("Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs. The culture jammer's encyclopedia.")

Graffiti as identifier - a tag individualises, asserts the author's existence, but nevertheless maintains distances. Tells you nothing more than the assertion of existence and that the author is himself, rather than someone else. It's not a work of art in that sense; it seeks not to communicate meaning or express an idea/reaction; merely to be, and to be noticed for being. Little more than an "I wuz ere"; individualises only to a differential degree - doesn't express anything unique. To this end it's much like a brand assertion - i.e. a modern advertisement. Brandable commodities aren't and needn't be unique - they just need to be more instantly identifiable than their competitors. Thus the adman's work goes into the brand, not description of the product. The brand IS the product.

Ad campaigns sometimes adopt a graffiti technique - images and words without explanation to spark attention. You get used to seeing an image/slogan without meaning or explanation, just like graffiti; the confusion lodges the image in your psyche,so the image itself, not the product (among millions of other competing products) sticks. Then the campaign unfurls its mysteries, everyone "gets" it and exhales, and the product is launched on a public already primed for it.

Graffiti humour - graffiti on the Old Kent Road - "Joey C is innocent" followed by "So is Arthur Fowler" [written at the time of the Eastenders character's wrongful incarceration]. Knowing irony based around the credence we give to the events in fictional soapland.

Tangents

The things I've been thinking about and reading since last week's lecture (Metaphor - the pictures embedded in our language) don't feel entirely relevant but then I suppose tangents often aren't. And I think generally you can wander off on one or two lines of thought, and circle back to the original trigger a month or two later, so I'll indulge these.

Baudrillard was mentioned a couple of times in the last two weeks, so I went book shopping. Got "Baudrillard and the Millennium" by Christopher Horrocks, which I suppose is a sort of starter on Baudrillard's thinking (particularly surrounding the advent of the Year 2000), and "The Condition of Post-Modernity" by David Harvey as a more generally useful thing. I'm most of the way through the Baudrillard, it's pretty interesting. He seems to pursues this idea that humans have always worked toward the 'end of history', but the world which we live in eliminates that possibility; that history is a fiction, a "culturally specific and constructed linear version ofevents liunked by causes and effects"; that the run up to the year 2000 saw us stuck in retro culture, humanity replaying everything that had gone before rather than progressing, caught in a kind of stasis, where even the major events of the era (e.g. the Gulf War) were simulations rather than truly real phenomena - events have no time to develop outside the media, and that which would have become "history" becomes nothing more than "current events". He also seems to be strongly interested in science, mathematics (particularly fractals and chaos theory, which is something I find interesting - don't know much about it yet but am aware of the idea that nothing is completely controllable, that every system develops "bugs") and technology - what role the latter has in our world, what effect it has on our philosophies, ideologies and perspective on ourselves; the idea that, as Horrocks puts it, "technoculture ensures that processes continue to unfold, but without meaning or sense . . . " the way chaos theory, singularities, etc, confuse and warp processes' original intentions, and the viral, "metastatic" (instant transferrence from one location to another) nature of the technoculture (including the media).

The effect of technology and the media upon 'history' is talked about; the way that events happen instantly before our eyes and are beamed around the world just as quickly, "exhausting our faith in reality" - "mass media accelerates events in all directions at once, escaping the space-time in which events make history". Horrocks, in his analysis of Baudrillard's thinking, says that "television breeds indifference, distance, scepticism and apathy. By making the world into an image, it numbs the imagination and produces adrenalin surges that simply lead to disillusionment."

There's an interesting quote by Nietzsche near the start of the book which is very reminiscent of what was discussed in the 4th lecture (metaphors): - "What then is truth? A moveable host of metaphors . . . which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical and binding. Truths are illusions which wehave forgotten are illusions."

Interestingly Baudrillard suggests that "Television protects us . . . its immunizing, prophylactic use protects us from an unbearable responsibility." It's strongly reminiscent of Nietszche's ideas about art as a 'veil of illusion', protecting us from the unimaginable horror of complete truth and understanding (about the absurdity of existence), and "thoughts and words . . . save us from the unbrooked effusion of the unconscious will."

In television's case, I guess what's meant is that these enormous, 'world-changing' and 'historical' events occur but are relayed to us through glass and plasma; we are not THERE, and do not necessarily have to cope with all the resulting effects; we are given the license to be mere observers and consumers of events. Moreover, television news increasingly condenses and simplifies things for us; news programmes delight in giving us graphs and commentary on things, meaning we don't have to think for ourselves about the implications and meaning of what we're told; complicated events meanwhile are reduced to headlines; memorable, massively significant occurrences (like the Christmas tsunami and "9/11") get reduced to "iconic" images and brief buzzwords. We think of the terrorist bombs of July 2005, and think of the news image of the decimated bus in Tavistock Square. It reminds me of what was said in an earlier lecture, about icons acting as an interface between us and something we would otherwise have difficulty dealing with (be it the essence of God or the inner workings of a Pentium). Meanwhile, for Baudrillard, even the notion of AIDS-related death is reduced to a countdown, as is the approach of the millennium.

Going off on a further tangent, I found a Solzhenitsyn book I didn't know I owned - a play, "Candle In The Wind". Solzhenitsyn uses the narrative of a (wrongly incarcerated) ex-convict's restyling as an ambitious scientist, and the effect his scientific ambition has on a passive friend whose mind he irrevocably alters using new technology, to ask questions about whether science should be used to alter human personality, and about the hedonistic society he saw around him.

I'm about halfway through it so far and a couple of things have come up. First, the redefinition of identity - not merely formulated from person to person, but imposed en masse; national identity is swept aside in a light-hearted comment by an arrogant research assistant who declares that "People used to think in terms of their homeland in the seventeenth century . . . but there haven't been any hopelands for a longtime now, they're a gruesome anachronism. There is only our little planet, and even that, it seems . . . " - this uttered to an African who still feels a sense of pride and obligation to his homeland. Yet it's imposed on him that this is not a modern way of thinking. Earlier we're introduced to the protagonist's step-aunt Tillie, a worldly character who delights in instant gratification. She's a journalist, and embraces her role at a magazine which deals with "foreign problems"; she, again, talks about what one SHOULD believe; "Don't you realize that our age breathes democracy? One must act in accordance with the spirit of the age! Personally, at the editorial office I always understand the spirit of the age." It all rather reminds me of the way that television news operates; facts fed to us complete with bitesized understanding; ideas reduced to metaphorical and iconic images, which we are invited to absorb and repeat to each other, whether or not we really understand what we're talking about.

Second, the idea of acceleration of events, explored by Baudrillard, comes up in Candle In The Wind too, in the form of scientific progress - things occur almost instantaneously, before it can be decided whether they actually ought to occur. "Right now in the whole of science . . . any half-baked captain's ship in a dilapidated schooner could set out to sea in any random direction and return having discovered a couple of new straits, if not a whole archipelago! In the sciences kids who are still wet behind the ears tackle problems which Rutherford would have kept away from and in three months' time they've already found the solution." This idea of acceleration is really interesting; our lectures so far have brought up the idea of images taking the places of words once more; an image, as a metaphor, providing instant (if basic/malformed) understanding of a concept; Baudrillard's thoughts about the media sending information manically in all directions before the effects and consequences of this information have even happened (therefore news of a phenomenon exists even before the phenomenon itself completely exists - yet the news, not the phenomenon, is what we have access to; we cling to the illusion rather than the reality, and the metaphor rather than the complete meaning.)