Reality TV and Second Life Avatars: Our New Creature Comforts

Wendy asked the class on Monday if simulations of reality comfort us or if this “comfort” is another means by which power operates. In relation to that, she asks are not all representations of reality not virtual or referential. We have a powerful notion of nostalgia that does not welcome any thought that every thing can be reduced to code or a system of references. However, Wendy does point to this contradiction, especially in the example of the popularity of reality television. It appears the American public no longer wants narrative story lines, but the construction of a false reality. The use of the word comfort brings to mind Jameson’s discussion on the postmodern body on page 351: “whether wandering through a postmodern hotel, locked into rock sound by means of headphones….(the postmodern body) is now exposed to a perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed.” The body here is the subject of an attack by the postmodern condition of space. Headphones are not just entertainment, but shields. Second Life not just a game, but an identity. Avatars have an interestingly diverse definition. In the computer realm it is a computer user’s representation of him or herself either 3-D, 2-D, or even text. Yet in the non-gaming universe the term implies a fanatic representation of oneself. How does an extreme, uncompromising simulation of oneself produce comfort? Is this distance and rest from the unrelenting nowness of the postmodern world not soothing a transition from one saturated space to another saturated space? If so why is distance so powerful, even when it is a virtual distance, for the body?