I actually mentioned this way back when about how Instagram is really a Baudrillardian phenomenon in which we simulate bygone eras indefinitely (McLuhan would say that we "caress" them). We create digital photos that look like the ones in our parents' photo albums.
I have to first of all say thanks Liza for sharing your Keweenaw adventure. I have to admit I started to feel some severe Baudrillardian vertigo when I saw that picture that you posted of your parents basically looking exactly the same as you and Connor. In fact, I thought it was you two until I scrolled down to the caption. I think I was already experiencing that vertigo as you posted so many pictures that looked like they came from the 60's or 70's—but somehow better and realer than any "authentic" photos from that era (some of the pictures of the sky for instance). Add to this that all your reading materials and sentiments seemed to fit the bill as well, and the simulation was complete. Also add to this the fact that many of the photos themselves involved reflections, photos within photos, or duplications of earlier photos.
And then I thought about the project and why we all are doing this. The Baudrillardian answer is pretty bleak: something to the effect that we are more comfortable resuscitating moribund time periods, experiences, movements, principles, and sentiments than we are experiencing our own. We get to simulate an encounter with reality that is long gone and that has been gutted of its essence, its inarticulate horror, its immediacy and danger (not saying that's what you're doing, by the way, more the project).
I'm reminded of a passage from Heart of Darkness:
When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks.According to the passage, the formless horror is still there beneath the surface. Or have we permanently extinguished the horror of immediacy and survival, suffocating it under layers of these densely knit pixels? I've heard that certain tribes refuse to have their pictures taken, believing the camera will steal their souls. What happens when we take pictures of everything?
Another question that comes up is the opposite: what happens when we renounce the satellite, eschew social media, and just "live"? McLuhan says the satellite provides a new environment wherein we will "sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form." Would we even have consciousness of our world and experience and being as art without the perspective of the satellite? It might be impossible to know, but it's interesting that people sometimes go on social media fasts or partial social media fasts. Liza, I think you went on a partial fast, but it may not have been enough to answer the question. Arguably, the Instagram satellite—and a little of the gmail satellite—provided you the requisite perspective to make art of the terrestrial artifact.
Education is really trying to push this environment now. Instead of telling kids to "turn it in," we're supposed to say "publish it" i.e. to their blog, tumblr, eportfolio, etc. I read one thing that struck me as somewhat shocking. Paraphrasing here, but the person said that if something isn't published online, it didn't happen. I'm taking it out of context somewhat, making it sound a lot more malevolent than it was intended, but that still sounds pretty weird.
It makes me wonder about people like Emily Dickinson, who expressly ordered her sister to burn all her poems. Her sister didn't, but what if she had? Would those poems have been any less precious? Would my own trip to the U.P. have been any less precious if I had walled it up in total silence instead of documenting it extensively through Instagram and Facebook, that is, if I had lived entirely in the utter perspectival collapse of a human relationship, a relationship with nature, a relationship with God?
Would it, taking the perspective of my vaguely remembered photo-phobic tribes, have been spiritually better? Because it seems like we should still have things that are just between us and other, us and nature, us and God. When our dying draws that curtain between us and our fellows and family, will we be ready for that profound aloneness? Will the transcendent dimension of the satellite have prepared us for that encounter? Does the satellite help us to live and love more or less soulfully?
In a world without God, it would seem that we would need to create our own transcendent dimension from which to make sense of our lives. Right now, our transcendent environment is that of the satellite, which allows us to become conscious of ourselves and the content of our lives as art. So the goal is not to get out of the cave toward some definitive light, but to continually be "getting behind" the current content, giving ourselves the environment whence to caress, mold, and pattern it.
In the absence of God, that "getting behind" might need to be our ongoing occupation for eternity.
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