Nicholas Carr identifies Baudrillard as a prophet of ‘twitterification’. He says “Those that know the technology cannot see beyond it, and those that don’t know the technology cannot see into it. Both end up trafficking in absurdity. ” and goes on to quote Baudrillard’s eerily prophetic words from 1999 (collected in the book The Vital Illusion, in UK):
Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social.
Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true.
Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present.
Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real.
Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex …
Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication … Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event.
It is pretty difficult to step back from the whirl of new technologies but we do need to take stock as well as experimenting if we are to shape those technologies and the world we live in.
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