We're Living in Screenworld, Reality Isn't in the Real World Anymore

Back in 1980 when Reagan was elected, our world would have seemed dizzying, ridiculous, scary, technologically promiscuous, and appallingly lacking in privacy

Today in Screenworld images of reality supersede reality itself—editing it, transforming it, playing with it in any fashion

ALTERNET Sep 2010 | Not so long ago, I taught a graduate writing seminar in which I got caught in an argument about virtual vs. "real" experience. Two students—among the brightest in the class—insisted that they could go to Rome via a computer program through which they could view every street, turn this corner and that as they pleased, look at every ruin and work of art, and their experience would be as real, as engaged, as if they'd actually been there. "But," said I, "a pigeon couldn't shit on your head."

Granting that any experience can be called "real," in that it is an experience, I argued that there are…

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