It’s Just Simulacrum of Emotion Taking Over Me

As my previous writings have described, simulacrum means a representation of something else, and hyper-real put simply means that the reality we live in is distorted by expectations and notions put to us by the media (advertising, new television programmes et cetera).

It got me thinking that although it could be true to say that I expect sun in Spain because the Thomson’s brochure sold me that idea, am I then right to wonder then if we are also being sold more abstract concepts such as emotions and morals? The paradigm here is that there is much debate over whether emotions and morals are innate or not. The question I am looking to answer is not that, only – are they bound within the simulacrum of the hyper-real?

My little brother has killed first hand more people on Call of Duty than any other serial killer in history put together. But he has never experienced death of a loved one. He has seen and cried to more deaths on television than he probably will ever do in real life. On average 500,000 people per day play Call of Duty, and many more have seen death exist as a recurring theme in television. Every day we are exposed to a number, that number is the amount of people dead in Syria. Do these notions distort the way in which we see death?

This question exposes the complexity of ‘reality’ as a concept. It is a broad notion that is shaped by our own idiosyncrascratic dealings with reality itself. We are all different, yet we all have emotions. If we can place these emotions into something created by the media, we are allowing ourselves to be metaphorically shampooed and conditioned. Similar to the way in which the media creates caricatures of real people, (those who save are stingy, males with ginger hair are geeky, muslims are scary) and even ideas about people who we have never met (those who look like Brad Pitt are cool, and Iraq is the enemy). Even if we don’t agree with these notions, the media plants these seeds in our consciousness to either agree with or not, whatever side we pick, the media has nevertheless succeeded in getting us thinking about it. As our thoughts are connected to our emotions, we allow the media to walk into our emotions and educate us how to feel and what to do.

You may disagree and a potential counter argument could be that you have experienced love before you saw it on television. However can we really be certain that the boy who taught you about love didn’t learn it from his interpretation of a love film? Or that the very idea that you were the kind of person he goes for wasn’t conditioned by the type of girl he liked on television, either physically or spiritually? This seems pedantic, but roll with it. We can read about love in books about history but remember that they exist within the pseudo-event (as described in my last article

), non-fiction books are there to educate you through the eyes of the writer, who themselves had pre-set ideas on what to write in a book. The author’s work contains words based on their idioms which you interpret confided to the simulacrum you exist in. You could argue that different cultures show different ways of showing love, traditionally in many societies, the woman’s way of showing affection was to look after the children, home and preparing the family’s food. Again, here we are conditioned by the hyper-real, so we only know that our way of showing love is right through showing us, or any other cultures, wrong doing.

This is called the Disneyland effect, whereby we only know Disneyland to be a ridiculous place by comparing it to our lives outside of it. However, the reality is that in Disneyland contains (albeit exasperated) microcosms of the real world such as street performers and money as value. We compare love between different cultures, and although we may see it as wrong and even preposterous, we cannot say that we experience a ‘more real love’ than them. There is irony to be found however such as people regarding Juno as a love story, when in reality it is almost hyper-hyper real as the story is not a happy one, yet some people desire that type of romance. Personally I think people just prefer the hamburger telephone to their own, unless you have one.

Social networking has also shown us hyper-real emotions, we live on there and yet we never display arguments to loved ones, which is not the case in reality. Though we can argue that arguments are another form of the hyper-real. The origins of the way in which emotions are depicted on the media can be based on reality, however it is only a simulacrum itself, and not an actuality. We take pictures of a great night out, but if a person doesn’t describe how they fell and broke their nose afterwards, and we don’t see them for a while, then we continue to believe that that night out was great.

Broaden this out to emotions; we see what sadness looks like and if we believe that the way in which the media teaches us that a given reaction to a situation is wrong, then we don’t do it. This is why the Internet ‘troll’ is so topical, because when someone ‘trolls’ the general consensus is that they are a bad person. But the notion of ‘troll’ and ‘bad’ are confided to the way in which the information is presented to us. An example of this would be a picture of the Queen’s Jubilee and someone writing underneath ‘worthless fat cow’. We see it as wrong because that is not the intentional reaction of the picture, however that person is only going against the intention, accepting that the original intention was that of those who took the picture. Thus ‘trolls’ validate the emotions that the original post intended, by undoing it.

This is all hypothetical and there is no real way of telling if this is actually true or not, and it may seem far-fetched but Oliver Cromwell abolished Christmas and the Queen cannot enter the City of London without consent from the Mayor, so there!

Moving now, to morality which is described as ‘principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour’. David Cameron consents for the British Army to kill people. This is spun in a way in the media that makes me feel like it is OK, because it is in the greater interests of the world and is watered down so much. Death is wrong, utilitarianism is good. However I only know who David Cameron is through the media. I only know that the army kills people through the media. Therefore the morals of this story reside in the hands of the media and how they want to portray it.

Another wartime example is Vietnam, in which the media and the public, turned on it due (in part) to the photos being published. All of these statements exist because the media taught me them. Do I then have control over stopping myself from following this pattern the next time? Has Disney laid the foundation down of my morality? Or does the very idea that I can pre-empt a next war, or even know that this is what the media does, distort morality? Is morality then nothing more than teachings of what people in power want you to believe which creates a veil between morality, consensus and the media? I HAVE NO IDEA.

Or is it a pseudo-event relying on previously taught morals through the media and other pseudo-events?