STEVE-O Poster

Poster’s claim that Postmodernity let’s the individual abandon “its claims to rationality and autonomy” (M 533), is telling of the acts of adolescents and even adults worldwide. The rapid cultural metamorphosis that is underway, with the advancement of technology, certainly has altered the consumer’s perception of reality and has definitely enabled “new domains of leisure and consumption” (M 533). The internet has spurred this transformation by enabling just about anyone to participate in our reality which has become a Postmodern virtual reality, which one… player…described as a simultaneous simulationary sense of ordinary reality and fiction. Poster comments on this trend, “By directly tinkering with reality, a simultaneous practice is set in place which alters forever the conditions under which the identity of the self is formed” (M 539). What a wonderful assessment of the inevitable consequences of screwing with reality! A “qualitative change…may also be [IS] imminent” (M 535). The internet’s multimedia platform has the ability to make any one a producer of sellable media, the “system will allow anybody with a camcorder to distribute videos to the world” (M 536). So how can I take this Deeper….?


I was watching 60 minutes this weekend and low and behold, I found a connection to some POMO text. It was an exposé on a group of young Floridians who thought it would be “fun” to beat a homeless man to death. What were these kids thinking?
But, if we take the warped concept of reality as explained by our theorist, can we really not see how some unguided juveniles can confuse the virtual reality “reality” of their multimedia experiences with that of the reality “virtual reality” that we live in. Follow me, If you take what we have discussed about Disney, the reproduction of fakeness, the sense of imitation reaching apexes which render reality inferior, the notion of technology bringing more reality than the real, this inevitably creates a void…err…make that a “GAP”… which makes things indistinguishable to the cooperating or “agreeing” entertainee. There is a “hallucinatory…confusion between copy and original” (Eco 202).
And this is where our “theatre of cruelty” (C 229), comes into play:


BUM FIGHTS
The mass produced, mass marketed, and mass consumed video series which exposes the twisted reality of drunken homeless men, the twisted reality of those who decided to exploit them, as well as the twisted reality of the market for such videos, or should a say entertainment? Zizek confirms this hypothosis, “What happens at the end of this process of virtualization, however, is that we begin to experience ‘real reality’ itself as a virtual entity” (C 231). Zizek’s concepts almost go as far as to justify the despicable and atrocious acts of the boys who committed the murder. Zizek writes,

The authentic twentieth-century passion for penetrating the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void [or my “GAP”]) through the cobweb of semblances which constitutes our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate ‘effect’…Snuff movies which deliver the ‘real thing’ are perhaps the ultimate truth of virtual reality. (C 232).

Or perhaps the ultimate “truth” of virtual reality is what the consumer should try to attain in real reality? Because at some point the two are hard to distinguish! As long as we are Amused it doesn’t really matter to the consumer. “Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display” (M 57).


"I bomb atomically, Socrates' philosophies
and hypothesis can't define how I be droppin these
mockeries, lyrically perform armed robberies" Inspectah Deck

One