Wednesday 11 March 2015

Virtual reality and the mass media

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Virtual reality is the incarceration and insightless-ignorance of the really real.

Virtual reality is thus the world of the mass media; because for virtuality to convince, it must be confirmed by all available sources - so that, wherever we choose to turn, that 'reality' is confirmed; and it also is confirmed over time.

(Confirmed, that is, so far as we can tell.)

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The mass media achieves this by its vast scale, its easy accessibility (indeed, the difficulty of avoiding it), its exclusive privileging of itself - and by its cognitive distortions.

The cognitive distortions of the mass media include a dream-like immunity to reality-testing. Mass media content never is tested against real-reality.

Instead, participants are addicted to distraction, and distraction displaces experience and evaluation.  Any menace to virtuality from reality is thwarted and dissolved by a continual throughput of attention-grabbing stimulation.

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Participation in the mass media is a state of continuous delirious intoxication - any momentary awareness of real-reality is rendered first unstable, then impossible - to live in virtual reality is a permanent psychosis.

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