Grant Tabler
Ian Reilly
AHSS 1090
31 March 2010
Reality Simplified
At some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI. –Morpheus from The Matrix
This statement, from the movie The Matrix, has interesting implications for our current society. For, we too are a society that, given the technologies of the new millennium, has fundamentally changed our ways of seeing and interpreting reality. Our reality remediates the information of the past, in much the same way as The Matrix’s machine implemented reality did within its own context. The machine implemented reality of The Matrix, is a remediation. As much as an email or ebook remediates their print medium. The Matrix system however, does this with reality itself. The machines’ matrix is a remediation at its core level because it is the process of sending or conveying the same information through a different medium and using different senses than the original source. This system is a remediation of reality because it conveys the information of reality without the tangible objects; it is delivered without the use of any senses. Reality simplified. The reality of The Matrix establishes itself as remediation through its similarity to other remediations, its use of immediacy and hypermediacy, and its adaptation of information into a new form.
Remediating something digitally is the process of taking information, often information from its tangible, physical form, such as books or mail and converting it to a form that we interpret with a different set of senses. Often taking some previously used senses out of the equation altogether. The system of The Matrix operates in this way when dealing with reality. When one sends a letter, one’s intent is to send information. You send it in a tangible physical form, the item you send exists in the dimensions of our perception, it exists in real space and time. It is interpretable with all our senses. However, when one sends an email the process changes. You send your information through virtual means, there is no physical representation, and there is no actual object in our dimension. Instead the email exists only in a virtual reality, a reality devoid of space and time. Its recipient no longer receives a tangible paper to interpret, only its digital remediation. There is no smell or feel or taste, or usually sound to an email. Only the sight is conserved.
The remediation process of mail into email is identical to that of the transference of reality into virtual reality in The Matrix. The simulated, virtual, reality of The Matrix seems so unmediated that it supplants reality itself, and portrays the mediated illusion as the real thing, free of mediation. The people trapped in the machines’ reality do not see anything amiss because they do not need true reality anymore. Though true reality still exists outside their reality, the mediation is more readily embraced. For example even when Neo is freed and learns the truth of his enslavement he refuses to believe it.
Remediation is a process which is characterized by two contrasting elements, immediacy and hypermediacy. The Matrix’s reality, like all virtual realities has near perfect immediacy. Immediacy is the realism or immersion that makes a medium seem less like a representation of something and more like the real thing. Remediation always aims to make the medium seem invisible, as if there is nothing separating the viewer from the object of mediation.
Hypermediacy is a somewhat more complex concept, though the concept is similar to that of hypertext. Hypertext is something that our culture understands as blue text which links to some other media, often a webpage. The hypertext is text that represents some other form of media. Hypermedia is based around the same concept. Hypermedia and its extension hypermediacy is the concept of a medium representing, or having some inference to, another medium or another type of media. Hypermediacy is the interface through which we interact with our media. What makes hypermediacy a contrast to the other characteristic of remediation, immediacy, is the reflection or multiplication of a medium inside another. Referencing or representing another medium can often seem to break the suspension of disbelief of an otherwise pure and immersive medium.
The simulated reality, like all virtual realities, attempts to garner more immediacy through the seemingly contradictory hypermediacy.
“These games strive for immediacy through hypermediacy –by coupling the physical sensation of movement with a sophisticated, stylized visual representation of a virtual environment. In their explicit hypermediacy, these hybrid games remind us again that all virtual reality applications are in fact hyper mediated” (Bolter, and Grusin 167).
Although Bolter and Grusin’s example of virtual reality are tied to video games, mostly due to technology at the time, the reality of The Matrix can still be compared along the same lines. This usage of hypermediacy draws on another term with the hyper prefix, hyper reality. The term hyper is usually defined as meaning “more than”. As such, hyper reality, like the mediation of virtual reality, is an amplified or stylized version of reality. From this we see that The Matrix’s virtual reality uses both immediacy and hypermediacy. It uses immediacy in its seamless immersion of the user, and hypermediacy in its amplification of and improvements upon actual reality.
The true reality in the movie is a bleak, post-apocalyptic, wasteland, in which humans struggle for survival. The machines’ virtual reality remedies this by allowing their trapped humans to exist in a reality that uses a hypermediation to instead impose the joys of nostalgia as an escape. "When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning” (Baudrillard 12) . As much as the simulated Matrix is a stylization of reality, nostalgia exemplifies this capacity. For, nostalgia is reality as you remember it. Nostalgia is an edited version of memory in which the good moments are often preserved and the less flattering moments are conveniently left out. Although the machines could have made a reality in which all the trapped humans were white rabbits, or dinosaurs, or whatever other joyous experience a human could want, nostalgia was the chosen method of pacification. It seems appropriate that a virtual construct aimed at stylizing a reality that someone could find normal and real, would be based around our human capacity to stylize our own realities through nostalgia.
It could be assumed that the trapped humans do not need true reality because they do not know they are trapped. However, according to the agents, the current stylization was not the first. “The first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program... The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.” (The Matrix) This relates to the idea of using nostalgia rather than imagination. The reality was rejected because the audience could not believe it. The world was too perfect. As much as the reality is a mediation that is forced upon the humans, it still requires the suspension of disbelief, the acceptance, of its audience.
It is from the machines’ misinterpretation of what constituted the perfect world that we see that “adapters are first interpreters and then creators” (Hutcheon 18). In order to create their simulation the machines needed first to decide how best to pacify humanity. In adapting the ideal of a perfect world the machines failed at first. Though later they succeeded by merely adapting a world which previously existed instead of creating a new one based on an ideal. By adapting a reality that humans could see as normal, rather than creating a perfect world, the machines created something we could believe, understand or relate to.
The Matrix represents a level of remediation that we only strive for today. Obviously it seems odd to set our technological goals on a world in which people are controlled by their remediation. However, our society is one that is forever striving for greater immediacy. Our need for immersion, leads us to constantly greater heights of technological remediation. We are continually striving to improve and modernize earlier systems to simplify and streamline our world.
The Matrix, though a strong example, is just one of thousands of sci-fi stories cautioning against our obsessive need to give technology more control over our lives and more power to do what they see as necessary. They are cautionary tales because giving the machines power always ends badly, and always for the same reasons. Machines are too logical. Though it would seem that logic would be the best way to govern, humans cannot abide by this. When the machines take power they analyze the human way of life, they see that we are irrational, easily misguided, and harmful to ourselves and others. Whether in The Matrix, I Robot, or a slew of such stories, the machines see that we are inherently flawed and attempt to save us from ourselves.
Whether they decide to quarantine us, or eradicate us, humanity is viewed as a destructive virus. The machines are trying to correct the flaw that is human self-interest. They are really attempting to change how we behave and inevitably how we interpret reality. The machines are a remediation of some aspects of ourselves. They are our logic and rationality, personified in a new form, without our emotion or prejudice. They are a remediation of humans based in rules and structure. However, for as much as they have gained in reasoning, they have lost in passion and feeling.
Perhaps this is how a society should be run, a republic based on logic and reason devoid of any emotional sway. Though I see the machines as more of a superficiality, our mind’s interpretation of what we think we should strive to be. Despite the rationality of the machines, despite their logical analysis of the situation, I believe that we cannot become them. Our society, our reality, is structured in such a way that we cannot live in logic alone. As much as we strive to emulate their virtues and as much as we may admire their reasoning capacities, we cannot live in their world, we cannot precipitate their reality.
Our society may be flawed, and we may indeed continue down this self-destructive path to whatever end. But without our humanity we might as well be at our end already.
-30-
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Phillip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Bolter, Jay, and Richard Grusin. Remediation : Understanding New Media . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press , 1999. 167. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York; London: Routledge, 2006.
The Matrix. Dir. Wachowski Brothers. Warner Brothers, 1999. DVD.
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