“Cultures are made up of communication processes. And all forms of communication, as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard taught us many years ago, are based on the production and consumption of signs (145). Thus there is no separation between ‘reality’ and symbolic representation. In all societies humankind has existed in and acted through a symbolic environment. Therefore, what is historically specific to the new communication system, organized around the electronic integration of all communication modes from the typographic to the multisensorial, is not its inducement of virtual reality but the construction of real virtuality. I shall explain, with the help of the dictionary, according to which: ‘virtual: being so in practice though not strictly or in name,’ and ‘real: actually existing’ (146). Thus reality, as experienced, has always been virtual because it is always perceived through symbols that frame practice with some meaning that escapes their strict semantic definition. It is precisely this ability of all forms of language to encode ambiguity and to open up a diversity of interpretations that makes cultural expressions distinct from formal logical/mathematical reasoning. It is through the polysemic character of our discourses that the complexity and even contradictory quality of messages of the human mind manifest themselves. This range of cultural variation of the meaning of messages is what enables us to interact with each other in a multiplicity of dimensions, some explicit, some implicit. Thus, when critics of electronic media argue that the new symbolic environment does not represent ‘reality’, they implicitly refer to an absurdly primitive notion of ‘uncoded’ real experience that never existed. All realities are communicated through symbols. And in human, interactive communication, regardless of the medium, all symbols are somewhat displaced in relation to their assigned semantic meaning. In a sense, all reality is virtually perceived.
145 Baudrillard (1972); Barthes (1978).
146 Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1992).”
- Castells, M., 2009. The Rise of the Network Society, Wiley-Blackwell, p. 403
Yes. Exactly right. Instead of a world of things shaped by thought we are moving into a world of thought shaped by things.
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