Channels, Fall 2016

Alford • Choosing to Choose Page 50 obfuscates reality so that people accept the dominant narrative of society that is technique. Technical imagery is disconnected from reality due to its layered nature. A picture references a real image when someone looks at it. When an artist digitizes that image, it is no longer the same. There is an ontological difference between traditional images and technical ones (p. 7). The difference, Flusser (2011) explained, is that “The first are observations of objects, the second computations of concepts. The first arise through depiction, the second through a peculiar hallucinatory power that has lost its faith in rules” (p. 7). Flusser’s argument in his essay Into the Universe of the Technical Image is long and convoluted, but his conclusion is clear: In the modern world of electronic imagery, images now function to condition humans to accept the social order of modern science. The social reality people experience from media and the internet creates something entirely illusory. Because the modern man lives his life through pixels, his reality is constructed through mosaics and code, forcing him to question what is real and what is not. Mass communication is not benign but instead has influenced how humans exist in the world. Flusser (2011) concluded: Perception theory, ethics and aesthetics, and even our very sense of being alive are in crisis. We live in an illusory world of technical images, and we increasingly experience, recognize, evaluate, and act as functions of these images. We owe these images to a technology that came from scientific theories, theories that show us ineluctably that “in reality,” everything is a swarm of points in a state of decay, a yawning emptiness. The science and technology that developed from it, these triumphs of Western civilization, have, on one hand, eroded the objective world around us into nothingness and, on the other, bathed us in a world of illusion. (p. 38) For Flusser, technical imagery such as graphic design, electronic interfaces, and even photographs has stripped humanity of objective senses of truth while offering them the compelling alternative of passivity and entertainment. Both Flusser and Ellul reveal the functions of the ideology of technique in modern society. And though their warnings may seem fatalistic, they do offer hope. Like McLuhan explained, nothing is inevitable if people simply pay attention to what is happening and find ways to deconstruct it and fight back. Flusser's alternative is play . Playing is an exchange of information that creates a new piece of information. The unpredictability of human play directly confronts the probabilities of technique and undermines them. Flusser (2011) explained this saying: Dialogues are controlled games of chance. They allow information that is already stored to be combined in all possible ways to construct new information. The word dialogue originally suggests a game of chance in which each of two or more memories tries to synthesize the information stored in another. But there can also be inner dialogues, in which one memory plays with the information it stores. When it produces new information, such an inner dialogue characterizes what is called, in common usage, a “creative individual. (p. 90)