Hyperreality

Ryan's presentation, while it explored something with which I was not wholly familiar, did bring to mind certain things that I had studied before. It brought to mind my research paper for a past philosophy class, a research paper about hyperreality. While googling to bring the concept of hyperreality back to the forefront of my mind, I came across this article, which actually mentions e-prime.

Ryan talked about how we come up with words to describe things as best we can, as we see them, but these combinations of letters to which we attach meaning and value will still only be titles. What makes these words real, the simple fact that we say so? This also brought to mind a book by Madeline L'Engle, whose title I cannot remember, in which one of her characters fought so strongly to hold on to the material, to resist the government that was attempting to get her to believe that two plus two could equal five..I agree that two (in the way we think of it, to stand in for an object coupled with an object or an entity coupled with another entity) plus two cannot equal five (in the sense that we think of it, to stand in for an object with an object with an object with an object with an object...). But who's to say that we can't change that which we think of when we hear the word "five?" What are these words but mere titles? And yet I understand her reluctance to give way, her fear of letting go of that with which she is so accustomed..

But back to the article that I came across. What is hyperreality? The author of said article says it rather well: "The gap between the real and the unreal, combined with the ambiguity and uncertainty regarding how to distinguish. You tend to default either to accepting everything as real, or believing everything is unreal, but deep down you’re never really sure." Could it be possible that everything is real, or vice versa? Madeleine L'Engle seems to be playing a large part in my train of thought lately, I'm not sure why, but another of her "fictional characters" was actually enrolled, by students at Yale, in a literature course. How's that for believing that everything is real? This character could either be seen as a purely fictional creation of L'Engle's mind, or, as the students at Yale chose to believe, a being who was sort of floating in the inbetween, waiting to be written into common knowledge by a benevolent writer such as L'Engle.

This has happened to me many times, I'm not sure about you guys - you're reading a book, watching a movie, or playing a video game intently, and you realize, after hearing someone's annoyed voice yelling your name, that he or she had tried to get your attention a couple of times before you snapped into what is perceived as "reality." For those few moments, that book or movie WAS your reality. How else do you explain feeling emotions for "fictional" characters? Whether it's crying when Rose lets go of Jack at the end of Titanic, jumping in fear when the killer pops out of nowhere in Scream, cringing when the creepy little dead girl crawls up the well in The Ring, or simply thinking Alexander Skarsgaard's character, Eric, is hot on True Blood, there is no denying that we all feel emotions for that which society tells us is fiction. Why would we feel emotions for that which we don't ACTUALLY believe in? It is my belief that we really DO believe that these things are real, and then we snap back into the deception that we, for some insane reason, push on ourselves about disbelieving that something is real.

Then again, maybe NOTHING is real. Who knows.