Ever watch sports on TV? Ever do it with the sound muted?
There was that experiment years ago, 1980 to be exact. NBC broadcast a Dolphins-Jets game without announcers. A one-off experiment. Sports fans are used to hearing announcers comment on the games they watch at the time they watch them. It seems that people don’t want TV coverage of sports without knowledgeable announcers telling them, for example, “Brady found him open in the end zone and threw a perfect pass.” And just in case the first comment doesn’t register, additional comments accompany the two or three replays, now enhanced with multiple perspectives and probability data.
I saw that 1980 game, by the way, and I confess to being a bit discombobulated because I had become accustomed to announcers yapping about the game, the players, and some bit of NFL history. Incessant chatter of others suddenly became a matter of observing and concluding. The players were real, but the experience was a little surreal. I was watching reality while simulaneously trying to make sense of it—on my own.
Apparently, our need to see and hear some confirmation of what we saw and heard applies to political debates, also. Can’t just watch debates without watching the post debate commentary by pundits. “Candidate So-n-So said she was against funding housing projects for grey squirrels.”
And it doesn’t require words. Pictures help when they are selectively edited. And expressions have their effect. I remember being a preteen when my mother pointed out the raised eyebrow of a longtime local Pittsburgh anchor she watched at noon during weekdays. That raised eyebrow indicated that he did not favor the news he was reporting. It was his nonverbal commentary. Subtle. Right? Just that movement of the eyebrow made the comment. A little muscle twitch was a message, an interpretation. Her indicating the significance of that small act led to my watching for nonverbal commentary by the expressions of all TV commentators whose faces betray a supposedly hidden bias and reveal that the ostensible isn’t necessarily the real.
Or take the stories that Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation and the fiction of Trump’s Russian Collusion: Both unrealities became realities for CNN’s, MSNBC’s, ABC’s, NBC’s, and CBS’s reluctant viewers, millions of them taking the simulacrum for reality, the manipulation for raw information for several years. Some, dare I say, still take the simulation for reality.
Simulation
In the words of Jean Baudrillard, “TV manipulates us” (30).* Every network and every station from local to national level has the power to manipulate. Baudrillard made that statement in the context of simulation.Reality isn’t always real; in fact, it might be more fequently unreal as video editors choose what they wish us to see. Baudrillard died in 2007. I wish he could have seen last Sunday’s broadcast of London-hosted game between the Jacksonville Jauguars and Atlanta Falcons: Total simulation with commentary in real time thanks to sensor chips in players’ shoulder pads and overhead camera work. The entire game was presented as computer-generated Toy Story reality.
It wasn’t real; and yet, it was real. And those who watched, including yours truly, listened to commentary on the game. The simulated players ran—more or less—the same vectors that the actual players ran. Sure, there were some computer glitches that frustrated the mind; the passes went to the general vicinity of the CGI player, but not quite right onto the receiver. But look at what I’m now writing about: Passes of CGI footballs to CGI caricatures playing a simulated version of an ongoing game. If I make a comment about the simulated game’s reality, do I show like so many gamers that my immersion into a pretend world is now complete? Have I, a non-gamer, entered a Tron-like world that confuses simulation with the real world?
In Fact, the World Lives on an Incline
Slanted news coverage isn’t new, and numerous editions of Madden Football reveal that even simulated sports events are part of the common consciousness. Simulation is almost impossible to avoid; but maybe we’ve been inclined to take simulacra for reality since our origin. Statues going back to Karahan Tepe and probably long before that suggest we treasure simulation and simulacra. We have museums devoted to sculpures. We have public sculptures depicting both historical and fictional characters. And in every representation from ancient Greek sculpture to Madden CGI football player, we allow some fiction to prevail, some slant on the news ancient or modern.
What about Those Subtle Indicators?
Be it a facial expression, body language, or outright commentary, news casters and sports casters all exhibit their biases. Sometimes open mikes reveal what lies beneath the masks of neutrality; sometimes slips of the tongue reveal the bias. I recall Troy Aikman and Joe Buck commenting on the overflight of jets before a game and their agreeing that such flights were superfluous and a waste of resources and would cease if Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were elected (Wonder how they voted?). That open mike comment revealed that hidden agendas exist even when the topic, like the opening ceremony at a football game, is a separate topic, a separate reality. And I recall Michelle Obama’s derisive comment and the affirming nod in agreement from her husband during the tri-folding of the flag, “All this just for a flag.” Yes, reality does show its ugly head above the smooth waters of simulated realism. Simulation does reveal itself for what it is eventually, just as those Toy Story passes not quite meeting the CGI wide receiver at the exact spot on the screen reveal the nature of the simulation and remind the viewer that what is on that screen isn’t really real.
The Perspective That Reveals
The best laid schemes, as Robert Burns wrote, can be revealed for what they are: Schemes designed to control the audience, schemes that are self-revealing for what they are. At some point some members of the audience will come to understand that what they are seeing is a manipulated simulation designed to control minds. Again, in the words of the poet,
“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley …” **
If Burns is correct, we will eventually be able to distinguish between deceitful simulation and reality. If the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray, then the plans of those who wish to control us will most likely also go astray. The deceit of simulacra will out itself; the manipulators will reveal themselves for what they are: Toy Story characters putting on a show that, though it is like reality, is not truly reality.
The simulators’ hope, in contrast, is that there will always be those who take the simulation as a reality: The Hunter Biden laptop, the Russian Collusion, the low intelligence of conservative—all this and more in spite of evidence to the contrary. They will, for example, claim that conservatives are Nazis all the while they push socialism and actively censor speech just like the real Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s. They will use a single incident, as they did in the George Floyd tragedy, to simulate a pervasive evil among police. They will continue to see their simulacra as reality as they did when rioters disrupted cities, committed violent crimes and destroyed properties during, as one government official put it, the “Summer of Love”—that was later revealed to be a summer of destruction, rape, and even murder.
-
But no simulation, no matter how well planned, is flawless. You can see that in the Toy Story version of an NFL game, the local or national news, or the political agendas pushed in the name of “a simulated truth.” ***
Advice
Look and listen on your own. Look for that raised eysbrow, that completed pass that just doesn’t quite hit the receiver, or the perfection in a statue that idealizes the flawed nature that exists in all humans. And listen. Those open-mike remarks, those slips of the tongue, those diatribes all point to an alternate reality. It’s that alternate reality, the real reality and not the simulated reality that frees the mind and leads to truth.
*Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U. Of Michigan Press. 1994.
ase
**Robert Burns. “To a Mouse.”
***Americans have been subjected to simulations for a very long time: In the 1930s, Ronald Reagan broadcast baseball games from a studio "He would call Chicago Cubs games, but rather than being at the game, he would recreate the action from nothing but a slip of paper typed by a telegraph operator who was transcribing plays sent by Morse code."--Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Museum
There was that experiment years ago, 1980 to be exact. NBC broadcast a Dolphins-Jets game without announcers. A one-off experiment. Sports fans are used to hearing announcers comment on the games they watch at the time they watch them. It seems that people don’t want TV coverage of sports without knowledgeable announcers telling them, for example, “Brady found him open in the end zone and threw a perfect pass.” And just in case the first comment doesn’t register, additional comments accompany the two or three replays, now enhanced with multiple perspectives and probability data.
I saw that 1980 game, by the way, and I confess to being a bit discombobulated because I had become accustomed to announcers yapping about the game, the players, and some bit of NFL history. Incessant chatter of others suddenly became a matter of observing and concluding. The players were real, but the experience was a little surreal. I was watching reality while simulaneously trying to make sense of it—on my own.
Apparently, our need to see and hear some confirmation of what we saw and heard applies to political debates, also. Can’t just watch debates without watching the post debate commentary by pundits. “Candidate So-n-So said she was against funding housing projects for grey squirrels.”
And it doesn’t require words. Pictures help when they are selectively edited. And expressions have their effect. I remember being a preteen when my mother pointed out the raised eyebrow of a longtime local Pittsburgh anchor she watched at noon during weekdays. That raised eyebrow indicated that he did not favor the news he was reporting. It was his nonverbal commentary. Subtle. Right? Just that movement of the eyebrow made the comment. A little muscle twitch was a message, an interpretation. Her indicating the significance of that small act led to my watching for nonverbal commentary by the expressions of all TV commentators whose faces betray a supposedly hidden bias and reveal that the ostensible isn’t necessarily the real.
Or take the stories that Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation and the fiction of Trump’s Russian Collusion: Both unrealities became realities for CNN’s, MSNBC’s, ABC’s, NBC’s, and CBS’s reluctant viewers, millions of them taking the simulacrum for reality, the manipulation for raw information for several years. Some, dare I say, still take the simulation for reality.
Simulation
In the words of Jean Baudrillard, “TV manipulates us” (30).* Every network and every station from local to national level has the power to manipulate. Baudrillard made that statement in the context of simulation.Reality isn’t always real; in fact, it might be more fequently unreal as video editors choose what they wish us to see. Baudrillard died in 2007. I wish he could have seen last Sunday’s broadcast of London-hosted game between the Jacksonville Jauguars and Atlanta Falcons: Total simulation with commentary in real time thanks to sensor chips in players’ shoulder pads and overhead camera work. The entire game was presented as computer-generated Toy Story reality.
It wasn’t real; and yet, it was real. And those who watched, including yours truly, listened to commentary on the game. The simulated players ran—more or less—the same vectors that the actual players ran. Sure, there were some computer glitches that frustrated the mind; the passes went to the general vicinity of the CGI player, but not quite right onto the receiver. But look at what I’m now writing about: Passes of CGI footballs to CGI caricatures playing a simulated version of an ongoing game. If I make a comment about the simulated game’s reality, do I show like so many gamers that my immersion into a pretend world is now complete? Have I, a non-gamer, entered a Tron-like world that confuses simulation with the real world?
In Fact, the World Lives on an Incline
Slanted news coverage isn’t new, and numerous editions of Madden Football reveal that even simulated sports events are part of the common consciousness. Simulation is almost impossible to avoid; but maybe we’ve been inclined to take simulacra for reality since our origin. Statues going back to Karahan Tepe and probably long before that suggest we treasure simulation and simulacra. We have museums devoted to sculpures. We have public sculptures depicting both historical and fictional characters. And in every representation from ancient Greek sculpture to Madden CGI football player, we allow some fiction to prevail, some slant on the news ancient or modern.
What about Those Subtle Indicators?
Be it a facial expression, body language, or outright commentary, news casters and sports casters all exhibit their biases. Sometimes open mikes reveal what lies beneath the masks of neutrality; sometimes slips of the tongue reveal the bias. I recall Troy Aikman and Joe Buck commenting on the overflight of jets before a game and their agreeing that such flights were superfluous and a waste of resources and would cease if Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were elected (Wonder how they voted?). That open mike comment revealed that hidden agendas exist even when the topic, like the opening ceremony at a football game, is a separate topic, a separate reality. And I recall Michelle Obama’s derisive comment and the affirming nod in agreement from her husband during the tri-folding of the flag, “All this just for a flag.” Yes, reality does show its ugly head above the smooth waters of simulated realism. Simulation does reveal itself for what it is eventually, just as those Toy Story passes not quite meeting the CGI wide receiver at the exact spot on the screen reveal the nature of the simulation and remind the viewer that what is on that screen isn’t really real.
The Perspective That Reveals
The best laid schemes, as Robert Burns wrote, can be revealed for what they are: Schemes designed to control the audience, schemes that are self-revealing for what they are. At some point some members of the audience will come to understand that what they are seeing is a manipulated simulation designed to control minds. Again, in the words of the poet,
“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley …” **
If Burns is correct, we will eventually be able to distinguish between deceitful simulation and reality. If the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray, then the plans of those who wish to control us will most likely also go astray. The deceit of simulacra will out itself; the manipulators will reveal themselves for what they are: Toy Story characters putting on a show that, though it is like reality, is not truly reality.
The simulators’ hope, in contrast, is that there will always be those who take the simulation as a reality: The Hunter Biden laptop, the Russian Collusion, the low intelligence of conservative—all this and more in spite of evidence to the contrary. They will, for example, claim that conservatives are Nazis all the while they push socialism and actively censor speech just like the real Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s. They will use a single incident, as they did in the George Floyd tragedy, to simulate a pervasive evil among police. They will continue to see their simulacra as reality as they did when rioters disrupted cities, committed violent crimes and destroyed properties during, as one government official put it, the “Summer of Love”—that was later revealed to be a summer of destruction, rape, and even murder.
-
But no simulation, no matter how well planned, is flawless. You can see that in the Toy Story version of an NFL game, the local or national news, or the political agendas pushed in the name of “a simulated truth.” ***
Advice
Look and listen on your own. Look for that raised eysbrow, that completed pass that just doesn’t quite hit the receiver, or the perfection in a statue that idealizes the flawed nature that exists in all humans. And listen. Those open-mike remarks, those slips of the tongue, those diatribes all point to an alternate reality. It’s that alternate reality, the real reality and not the simulated reality that frees the mind and leads to truth.
*Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U. Of Michigan Press. 1994.
ase
**Robert Burns. “To a Mouse.”
***Americans have been subjected to simulations for a very long time: In the 1930s, Ronald Reagan broadcast baseball games from a studio "He would call Chicago Cubs games, but rather than being at the game, he would recreate the action from nothing but a slip of paper typed by a telegraph operator who was transcribing plays sent by Morse code."--Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Museum
RSS Feed