Our Fast Moving Pseudo-Culture
Reality has been subsumed by simulations, which constitute the “hyper real.” People accustomed to the reality presented by TV, film and the news media are now disappointed in the merely real.
To many, Disneyland’s Main Street seems more real than its source – the main streets in towns where many of the stores have closed because the factories have shut down and the street itself is seedy, untended and littered with refuse. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe the rest is real, when in fact all of America is no longer real, but of the order of the hyper real and simulation.
Our daily encounters with one another and with nature, our gestures, our speech, are so thoroughly impregnated with a rhetoric absorbed through the airwaves that we have no certain claim to the originality of our actions. Every cigarette, every cocktail, every love affair echoes down a never-ending passageway of references – to advertisements, to television shows, to movies – to the point where we no longer know if we mimic or if we are mimicked.
Cultural expression that is specifically engineered for the material gain of some group or individual is “pseudo-culture.” New York and Los Angeles have become centers where culture is churned out for mass consumption, both throughout the United States and around the world. This means that regardless of the cultural differences in the lives of the masses, the same kind of shows with the same kind of people and the same kind of cultural expressions are shown on TV. In the same way, fast food restaurants are springing up around the world that push the same kind of hamburgers and fried chicken, despite, and generally to the detriment of local culture, customs and ecology.
This pseudo-culture becomes popular by playing to the most crude, external sentiments of the human mind: greed, fear, insecurity, lust. Our more subtle qualities such as compassion, service-mindedness and longing for greatness are rarely cultivated in the fast moving commercial pseudo-culture.
