Is Reality going... going... gone?
"Competing ontology often overwrites the other as lesser" is one of the points Victoria Kuttainen (2015) made in this week's lecture. If we were to think of narratives in reality as books, movies, and magazines as one ontology and narratives in virtuality as photos and text on social media as a competing ontology, I think it is safe to say that, alarmingly, virtuality is overwriting reality as a lesser ontology.
Kuttainen talks in her reading Style, Modernity and Popular Magazines (2013) about in the 1920s and 1930s, magazines were becoming a popular way for readers and "armchair travellers" back home in Australia to experience stories of the Pacific by reading words and looking at pictures on a page in front of them. At the time this was the ontology in which narratives were created and people understood far away lands, however these commercial products have been dubbed 'ancient' in comparison to the new narratives of place in photographs and text on a screen which have risen to prominence. Fast forward 80 or 90 years and we can experience the Pacific on our Instagram feed by simply searching #Pacific, or perhaps living vicariously through someone we are following who is on vacation there.
Of course we cannot tell the future, and neither could the consumers of magazines in the 1920s and 30s which are now just seen as cultural artefacts, but perhaps social media will suffer the same fate and drift away into the back of cultural consciousness. Already in this day and age, technology is developing so quickly that it seems there is a new social media site starting up every week, and young people are so engrossed in these new ones that the old ones are being forgotten. It is always food for thought.
References:
Kuttainen, V. (2015). Stories and Places [Lecture Slides]. James Cook University: TownsvilleKuttainen, V. (2013). Style, Modernity and Popular Magazines. In Telling Stories. (pp. 51-56). Monash University Publishing: Australia
This phenomenon of typical media slowly dying is all too prominent in today’s culture, and although this has been happening all throughout history the process is getting alarmingly fast. As was said magazines have become culturally irrelevant in modern times, so too (mostly) have newspapers and even to an extent TV (Jager, 2014). Other once milestones in technology have faded into non-existence, such as silent films, black and white films and even physical film itself. However this deterioration happened over the course of 100 years, yet now new tech and new trends have a shelf life of around 3-4 years, and that’s being generous! Much like magazines and films (Jager, 2014)once were social media sites have reached their peak and are now on the decline in popularity, as they have nothing new to present to the shortened attention spans of the world today. It’s a scary though, knowing that as trends lifespans shorten to that rivalling may flies, how will that effect human interaction and life? Will we just have to keep up with these day long trends, or will we come full circle and end up where we started?
ReplyDeleteBibliography
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Jager, C. (2014, February 3). JB Hi-Fi's Sales Results Reveal More People Are Ditching Physical Media. Retrieved August 30, 2015, from Lifehacker: http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2014/02/jb-hi-fis-sales-results-show-more-people-are-ditching-physical-media/
Olson, P. (2015, January 28). Facebook was the One Network People Used Less in2014. Retrieved August 30, 2015, from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/01/27/facebook-active-users-decline/
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