Sometimes I catch myself checking the weather on the internet instead of sticking my head out of the window. It’s a strange idea that with our current day technologies one doesn’t need to leave his room in order to survive. Food can be ordered by phone, studies can be done online, and news can be watched on television.
It’s actually the latter that paved the way for a dramatic renewal of the experience of presence, and not the internet, as many claim. And specifically by one genre within this medium: news television.
On-location split screens, the movement of one continent to another in split seconds, instant financial information flowing at the bottom of the screen. Don’t forget the mandatory rotating globe in every intro. All of these are signs that make us –the viewers- feel omnipresent. The constant stress on watching sometimes live, the immediacy, creates a sense of hyperreality: the inability to distinguish reality from simulated reality. It was the postmodern French philosopher Jean Baudrillard who wrote the book “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”, in which he writes about the clinical, videogame-like representation of that war by news channels such as CNN.
The difference between the experience of presence within (news) television and the internet is that in the latter the notion of hypermediacy is much more present: the user is aware of the fact that he is using a technology. So in the debate around immediate global exchange, don’t forget the originators. Back to you, readers.
- Jonas Kooyman
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