Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot – a veritable concentration camp – is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade. —Jean Baudrillard —Simulacra and SimulationsJean Baudrillard, Selected Writings,)
He doesn’t cite his source for the temperature at which Walt Disney’s corpse is cryogenically suspsended, but it’s still a great paragraph from an influential essay.
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I think it's probably more likely that the Facebooking and MySpacing the students do on their own time are more rich with unexamined expressions of indentity-construction. I continue to be very pleased with the quality of the academic blogging that I'm seeing. When I look back at the (offline) journals that I kept when I was an undergrad, I'm amazed at how little I wrote about my classes. Most of the time I was writing about my efforts to secure the warmth and affection of the crowd as I wandered through the pavilions of my own academic utopia.
I like to read blogs so I can construct an image of who the author is, pieced together from the ebb and flow of their writing. But reading a MySpace or Facebook profile isn't as intellectually satisfying. Blogs are a medium for writers, yet writing is secondary on social networking sites operate on connections and memberships and tags. This has the advantage of opening up the online culture beyond the world of writers. But as an English major I chose to live in a world of writers, so the social networking spaces seem shallow to me.
Last fall I taught a course on "Writing for the Internet," and we started with a unit on online identity. Most of the students had online presences, but even though the class was mostly English majors, with the exception of a few students who were active in Harry Potter fanfic communities and a good number of students who had blogged for me in other courses, those online presences were not *writing* presences.
In the past in various classes I have used a PBS video on the commercial construction of youth culture, I've taught Gibson's Pattern Recognition (which bombed in my American Lit class -- only a few students bothered to read it), and I have prepared a unit on Disney in culture (but I'm still looking for an appropriate class).
I had a successful class on Videogame Culture and Theory that examined such issues, and one student from that class (an undergrad) has given two conference papers on videogames and ethics. I'd like to see more communications majors in my journalism and media classes, so I could have access to a critical mass of students who would find such subjects intriguing; as it is, there's plenty of cross-over in the other direction.
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this comment, but I'll post it anyway.
Dennis: Thanks for citing the selection from Baudrillard. With what we now know about how the brain "manufactures" reality through selective sensory perceptions, Baudrillard was not far off. The old refrain that "the media is the message" also relates well to this quotation. Do your classroom bloggers reflect on how their compositions help to define the daily realities they experience as students?
In other words, do they understand that whatever media (news, blogs, wikis, music, art) that they choose to focus on says a lot about where their socio-cultural interests and priorities are? For instance, if I were fascinated by Disney cartoons, could I learn to be critical about the messages that they portray? What do you think?