04/17/2000
Originally published in Style 29 (1995): 314-327.
From AT&T advertisements to White House policy statements, America has been changing the world and creating a new one: one that exists on the shimmering surface of our computer screens. The number of computers connected to the worldwide network of Internet increasing rapidly. In response to this growth, the media has refurbished that old American icon of both progress and freedom: the highway. Net does more than network the globe; it creates a metaphorical world in which we conduct our lives.
Baudrillard provides a provocative heading for "navigating" this hyperreal terrain. Although he has not addressed worldwide networking and Internet in the specific in his writing, his comments on telematics, along with his more general critiques of modernity, provide an interesting means for exploring the metaphoricity of Internet.
"Cyberspace" no longer strictly refers to the fictional "matrix" in William Gibson's novel, Neuromancer; it has now entered into common speech on and off the 'net as a shorthand for this conception of computer networks as a cybernetic space. From a Baudrillardian perspective, this figuration of Internet as a kind of cybernetic terrain works to undermine the symbolic distance between the metaphoric and the real. It abandons "the real" for the hyperreal by presenting an increasingly real simulation of a comprehensive and comprehendible world.
Just as the highways once transformed our country, the Information Superhighway" offers an image of dramatic change in American lives through a change in virtual landscape. One doesn't "go" somewhere when picking up the telephone. But when the computer couples with these same telephone lines, suddenly spatial and kinetic metaphors begin to proliferate. The "Information Superhighway" depends upon a more subtle metaphorical figuration--a virtual topography in which speed, motion, and direction become possible. No longer a metaphor for change, the simulated highway of Internet becomes a form of virtual reality.
In this model, the screen becomes a hyperreal vehicle for traveling across a simulated world. Rather than treating this endlessly repeated image of "travels in cyberspace" strictly as a clever marketing gimmick, the author suggests that this conceptual model serves a definite purpose in contemporary culture, one which creates the simulation of a form of power.
A virtual potential space replaces real kinetic space, or rather, "real" potential translates metaphorically into a virtual "kinetic" energy. The image of "cybertravel" has currency precisely because it offers a metaphorical world on/beyond a computer screen, a "globe" that no longer stands for the world because it has become "the world." This perspective on the current media images of Internet suggests that the conceptual model of a cybernetic "space" does not augment the world; it abandons the world for one which can be fully realized and fully encompassed--a world of transparency and immediacy.No longer does technology encompass the world; now it replaces it with a "more real than real" simulation.
Baudrillard's comments suggest that the current condition of telematics is a fulfillment of the telos of communication, primarily that of immediacy and transparency. The ironic revenge of the system, he claims, is that through the ability of technology to obtain--and supersede--these goals, we have reached a catastrophic moment in which "speaking" no longer has a place in the world.
For Baudrillard, as with Marshall McLuhan, telematics supersedes this history of writing: an apotheosis of immediacy through the medium. But as Arthur Kroker points out, in place of McLuhan's utopia of the "global village," Baudrillard sees the hyperreal world of immediacy as a cold, desolate realm of communication and information. Instead of providing a "universalization," these media create a satellisation: "It is man with his planet Earth, with his territory, with his body, who is now the satellite. Once transcendent, he has become exorbitate". Satellisation, however, does not yield alienation; rather, this state is one of "overproximity" to a simulated, transparent world.
To apply Baudrillard to this utopianism, one would have to conclude that cyber-community offers nothing more than a strategy of deterrence; like a Disneyland for Enlightenment conceptions of community, it creates "an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter".
Internet, rather than presenting a simulation of totality, might provide a space of play. Rather than pursuing ends through this technology, one might instead turn oneself over to the drift and derive of "cyberspace." Baudrillard's fatal vision shimmers on the surface of our computer screens. His vision, however, also challenges us to find a depth to the screen, to find- -or rather, lose--ourselves on a different heading, off our familiar paths.