The Sixth Teaching
Ever find yourself in a really bizarre situation and you’re not really sure what you’re doing there or what you should be doing? Well I now find myself in a computer cluster of a university I don’t go to anymore, logged on to a computer as someone else, writing a teaching I should have written 18 months ago cos if I don’t look like I’m doing work they’ll throw me off the computer so one of the poor souls who actually has an essay to write can use it. Oh well, so long as nobody reads over my shoulder I’ll get away with it.
So. Reality. Apparently, according to me, it doesn’t exist. Maybe I should reread that book so I have some idea why I came to that conclusion. Or I could just waffle for a page and see what I come up with.
I think the idea was that the media takes everything we know and blows it up to such proportions that it becomes something else. Something unreal. Using a very famous example – a man and his girlfriend die in a car crash while on holiday in Paris. We all know the story. But she’s famous so it’s all over the papers the next and it becomes a great tragedy. Most of the country go into mourning, cry a lot and it’s all we hear about for months. Then they start blaming people and it becomes a bizarre media-led attack on the media. Then it becomes a conspiracy of X-Files proportions. Then I’ve no idea what happened next because everyone stopped caring because somewhere along the way it stopped being sad and it stopped being real and just became a story.
I heard a story the other day about someone who watched the eclipse on tv even though all he had to do was go outside to see it for himself. Which is a little odd. But it does prompt the idea that maybe tv and the media hasn’t destroyed reality, perhaps it has become reality. If you hear something shocking/surprising/in any way unexpected has happened the first thing people do is watch for it on the news, read the paper or look on teletext. People see things for themselves and they still want the tv to tell them it happened. It’s like we don’t trust our own judgement any more, we need Huw Edwards or Trevor McDonald to tell us what to believe.
Our reality is unique to us. We know what belongs in our own personal world. And while this teaching may be real to me, it’s probably a pile of crap to you.