In the sense that two human beings were in hyperactive genital contact, it was absolutely real. Yet there was no sense of the joining of goddess and god in an ultimate merging of bodies and souls... Instead, what the entire neighbourhood could hardly help but hear, were learned behaviours being acted out on a bedroom stage. 'Love' was being made in the way that it is taught to and understood by many in our culture – athletic and joyless – with behaviours modeled from the most commonly accepted and available guide: pornography.
Humans are role-modeling machines, recording, replaying and adapting the behaviours that their society deems necessary or appropriate for individual and group survival. We behave in the way that we are expected to behave – or, at least, how we think we are expected to behave. In earlier times this would have meant learning vital survival skills from our elders to cope with life in the immediate environment: hunting, fire-making, cooking, knowledge of poisonous and medicinal plants, making tools and shelters, knowledge of animal behaviours, local geography. Today our role-models are abstracted, many levels removed from direct experience. With fathers absent, mothers over-burdened and our elders shut safely out of sight in sanitised death camps, only the ubiquitous media remain to shape our sense of self, our purpose in the world, and our knowledge of how to be.
My parent's generation will soon be the last living humans to remember a world without television. There is already no one alive who can remember a world without advertising. The insidious use of powerful contemporary psychological knowledge by advertising companies to manipulate unsuspecting consumers was exposed as early as the 1950s. Since that time the proliferation of visual media and its reciprocal, symbiotic dependence on advertising has become total, its influence all-encompassing. Even as we become more media-literate, more able to identify and, seemingly, avoid becoming the helpless targets of corporate marketeers, we are still victims – isolated, completely detached from the first-hand experience of reality.
Our experience of life in this new millennium is Ouroboros – the objects of our perception refer only back to themselves. Take a journey from a suburb to the centre of any city in the western world and you will find an unbroken stream of words, images, signs, advertisements, newspapers, magazines, music and moving images – all of which form the narrative of the journey. These signifiers have actually become the basis of our experience. The world of our perception has split away from tangible reality and is packaged back to us in a closed loop; an inescapable reflection of the banality of our simplest desires and insecurities.
This narrow world is no longer a reflection of life, as there is no experience of original life left for it to portray. Instead it reflects only itself reflecting itself – the direct experience it once referred to is lost in the arc of infinite mirrors; always promised, but perpetually out of reach. It is Philip K Dick's Black Iron Prison. The penitentiary world of the small self. A honeycomb of little me's lost in unbroken thought-streams, referring endlessly back to the same sources.
This is the narrow world our children are born into. Marketed to from birth, they are immersed in an artificial universe where the expression of emotion is learned from soap operas and romantic comedies, the amoral compass is magnetised to the ultra-violent north of Grand Theft Auto, and rather than go outside and bang a peg into the ground, the family can gather round the Wii and while away the hours with a game of virtual quoits.
As each generation connects less and less with the realities of the outer world, understands less and less of real human interaction, the narrow world becomes narrower still, until the serpent finally gags on its own tail. Though the diaphragm still draws breath into the lungs and the physical heart still pumps blood round the body, no one can be said to be truly alive.
