How Simulated Hyper-Real Screen Experiences Can Eclipse Those in Real Life

A vividwhiteboard illustrationbyAfterSkool visually narrates a powerful 1993 lecture given by the late Rick Roderick of the Teaching Company as part of his series The Self Under Siege". In this piece Roderick talks about how in postmodern life, online and on-screen experiences can eclipse those in real life.

We've already said reality is simply that whichcan be simulated. Can't be simulated if it's not real. Butmore real than real is a reality ....in A Clockwork Orange" there's a great line that anticipates the postmodern when when the character played by Malcolm McDow says It's funnyhow blood isn't really blood until you viddie it on the screen". Until you see it on a movie screen. In real life it looks kind of brown and mucky. On the screen it looks you know more real thanreal blood.

Roderick also notes the irony of having leisure time that is connected to a screen.

The human race, which labored for millennia to reduce working hours in order to produce leisure so we could enjoy this very leisure. Thatthen turns in a kind of vengeful act against us, absorbing our leisure time which was to be our living time into time now spent in the serviceof what can only be called this inhuman spectacle. I mean it's a very bizarre and twisted fight inwhich to which postmodernity has led us. So I would be wary of simple answers to this and all we coulddo is wait and see what will happen.