Mediated Or Non Mediated?

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The new Polestar car with no rear window, just a camera/screen: nothing radically new, really; but mentioned in a piece on Radio Four this afternoon. However, the discussion soon turned around to the notion of eliminating windows on houses and replacing them with screens that would show us the outside world via cameras, or if the view's simply not good enough, show us a 'better', maybe virtual, world instead, to suit our taste. Why not go the whole hog and wear VR goggles all the time, with built in cameras to show us what's out there beyond our heads: apply some algorithms to filter out the undesirable bits, and there you are! Reality without the real bits getting in the way. We already live in a second-hand, mediated existence through our phones and social media anyway, so why not? Has reality got that bad that first-hand experience of it is simply intolerable? Frankly it all sounds like bollocks to me, but who am I to complain? As Laurie Anderson put it on her seminal 1982 album 'Big Science': "I think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise, what are all the characters going to fall off of?" Think about it...


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