Shadowland: Megan Garber on how the mechanisms of reality TV taught us to trust no one The executives, he said, were filling the air with “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.” They were turning TV into “a vast wasteland.” ![]() Kennedy to lead the Federal Communications Commission, gave a speech before a convocation of TV-industry leaders. In 1961, Newton Minow, just appointed by President John F. But the encroachments of a post-truth world are matters of culture as well. When scholars warn of the United States becoming a “post-truth” society, they typically focus on the ills that poison our politics: the misinformation, the mistrust, the president who apparently thought he could edit a hurricane with a Sharpie. ![]() We live our lives, willingly or not, within the metaverse. The result will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathize with one another, even how to govern and be governed. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. In the future, the writers warned, we will surrender ourselves to our entertainment. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Where were those Amazon drivers doing their dancing, if not in the metaverse? But the promise is also redundant: Zuckerberg positions himself as an innovator, but the environment that Meta is marketing already exists. Why have mere users when you can have residents?įor now, Meta’s promise of immersive entertainment seems as clunky as the goggles required to access all that limitless fun. The choice was apt: The aspiration of the renamed company is to engineer a kind of endlessness. For its new logo, the company redesigned the infinity symbol, all twists with no end. In October 2021, he rebranded Facebook as Meta to plant a flag in this notional landscape. No company has placed a bigger bet on this future than Mark Zuckerberg’s. In the metaverse, the promise goes, we will finally be able to do what science fiction foretold: live within our illusions. ![]() Their approaches vary, but their goal is the same: to transform entertainment from something we choose, channel by channel or stream by stream or feed by feed, into something we inhabit. Microsoft, Alibaba, and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, have all made significant investments in virtual and augmented reality. In the years since, the metaverse has leaped from science fiction and into our lives. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World described the “feelies”-movies that, embracing the tactile as well as the visual, were “far more real than reality.” In 1992, Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash imagined a form of virtual entertainment so immersive that it would allow people, essentially, to live within it. ![]() The totalitarian regime of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 burned books, yet encouraged the watching of television. George Orwell’s 1984 had the telescreen, a Ring-like device that surveilled and broadcast at the same time. But I kept thinking about those clips, posted by customers who saw themselves as directors and populated by people who, in the course of doing one job, had been stage-managed into another.ĭystopias often share a common feature: Amusement, in their skewed worlds, becomes a means of captivity rather than escape. Watching that video, I did what I often do when taking in the news these days: I stared in disbelief, briefly wondered about the difference between the dystopian and the merely weird, and went about my business. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |