Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

Virtual Reality and Christian Identity: A: The Digital Image as Hyper-Reality

“You can see the game better on TV than at the stadium.” On the big screen at a rock concert, the rock star is literally and figuratively ‘bigger than life.” In the corporate investor’s meeting, at the political rally, at the hockey game, attention is fixed not always on the stage or podium but often on the images shown on the monitor. The virtual reality, the image, is bigger, more vibrant, therefore more imposing and impressive than the reality, a tiny figure on a stage or behind a podium far away. A teenager spends hours at a time playing a computer game; “you have the impression that he really thinks there is a room behind the computer screen,” says a social worker. Social workers in Germany report that teen sexual relationships, in some urban milieus, is changing: the new patterns mimic pornographic sex scenarios available on the Internet, video rentals and DVDs.1 What is more “real” in the senses of imposing, influential on behavior and consciousness today: real objects and events in the world or “virtual reality?” This is the issue at the heart of this Third Essay on Postmodernism and Christianity.

This essay has two parts. This Part A focuses on electronic imagery as a central tool and symbol of virtual reality. Part B, scheduled for next month, addresses implications of the digital age for Christian teaching, church management, pastoral care, worship and prayer.

Christian Investment

The essays of this series2 (this is the third;) assume that Postmodern culture is increasingly the context in which Christians will live and carry out their ministries. “Postmodern” increasingly describes the cultures of North America and Europe. But also, through globalization3 of western cultures and western market capitalism, “Postmodern” also increasingly describes urban cultures of China, Japan, and India and the milieus of social elites in Dubai, Tehran, Kuwait and Cairo. Of course, thoughtful Christians, especially Christian teachers and persons preparing for and engaged in professional Christian ministry, will want to understand this emerging Postmodern culture as well as possible.4

The theme of image and reality directly concerns truth, truthfulness and what people count as real. Obviously, Christian faith is vitally interested in what is real and what is not real. The Prologue to John’s Gospel says that Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, is full of grace and truth. Jesus taught that the truth would make us free. Christian preaching, Christian teaching, Christian witness and mission assume that human beings are capable of discerning truth. Reality and Truth belong intimately together. Christianity believes that God is real in the fullest possible sense and that the world, including our selves, are real in a creaturely sense. Christian faith and ministry are vitally affected, therefore, when people’s sense of what is real changes. Hence, this theme of Postmodern virtual reality and the Modern notion of “the world of objects” is centrally important for Christians.

But Christian faith is also vitally interested in the subject of image. Christians believe that humans are created in the image of God (imago Dei). Scripture also teaches that Jesus Christ is the image of God in the fullest sense. Baptism and Eucharist employ material things as “effective signs” (signa effectiva) , a kind of active image. Recalling just these few central aspects of Christian faith hint at the relevance of digital imaging’s impact on our senses of reality for Christian identity and ministry. The second part of this third Essay address implications for Christian identity, community and mission.

Expectations and Structure of this Essay

The reader should not expect from this or any single essay a clear and total picture of the Postmodern age. Focusing on the electronic image, on digital codes and models, is no magic key making Postmodernism simple to understand and easy to relate to Christian life and ministry. Digital images and Information Technology is only one theme among Postmodern writers, although all Postmodernism writers I have encountered agree that the electronic media and the digital image deeply affect contemporary perception of reality and profoundly shape Postmodern consciousness. Realistically, we can expect that examining the digital image will deepen our understanding of the Postmodernism ethos and lead us toward implications for Christian life and ministry.

But no informed, thoughtful person has a clear-cut, simple picture of Postmodernism. Culture critics who are counted as the key Postmodern writers do not have such a clear picture. Many thinkers labeled “Postmodern” want to shake off the label; Postmodern writers, mostly an older generation of French intellectuals, differ greatly among themselves on some issues. All thoughtful writers on Postmodernism acknowledge the difficulty of defining Postmodernism and readily say that Postmodernism’s relations to Modernity are complicated. What this essay does provide is a deeper insight into our Postmodern ethos preparing for some implications for Christian identity and ministry, in the second part of the essay.

This essay has three major sections. In the first, I briefly present the main idea of this essay. In the second, I discuss the nature of the electronic or digital image. In the third part, I draw from Marshall McLuhan’s and Jean Baudrillard’s 5 cultural analyses, examining their view that the digital image changes and undermines the Modern sense of the “real” object world, and thus changing our sense of what is “real.”

I. Our Theme: Virtual Reality and the “De-Realization” of the Object World
We meet the electronic image, as such, most directly in ads, on the TV screen and on our computer monitor, especially when accessing the Internet. However, digital images are only one expression of digital coding. Digital coding underlies all aspects of modern communication and has a central place in every aspect of modern life: computer-aided design (CAD) , medical imaging in diagnostics and surgery, space exploration, print communication, robotization in production and military surveillance6 . Microchips in contemporary autos remind us to shut the door, buckle up, not hit something behind us and direct us in dulcet tones to turn left half a mile ahead. In this essay, digital image refers not to the electronic visual image only but also to digital coding and modeling generally.

I work in this essay with two Postmodern writers who say that digital coding generates a virtual reality that is destabilizing, “de-realizing” an earlier, Modern, sense of the world of objects. Modernity considered real things to be three-dimensional, measurable objects in space and time. The Postmodern writers I draw on in this Part A say virtual reality is displacing the “world of objects, ” in effectiveness and influence, replacing them with electronic images of real objects having their own power and influence.

These Postmodern writers are, of course, not saying that the virtual world of digital imagery eliminates real objects—trees, cars, human bodies, houses and oceans— in space and time. Their claim is that digital images, codes and models, interacting and interconnecting with one another, generate a virtual world, a second “world of objects” that is changing how we relate to the real world and to ourselves.

We will use the phrases “virtual reality” and “virtual world” often in this part of our Third Essay. We will claim that Modernity defined “reality” as a function of measurements of extended objects. 7 When conceiving what sort of reality “virtual reality” is, our first impulse could easily to define virtual reality by the terms Modernity used for the world of real things. Among characteristics Modern people use to define “real” are: being present to a conscious subject here and now in space and time; being different from and “over against” a conscious subject; having a stable, “objective” identity through time; having mass and three-dimensional extension; being subject to immediate experience through the senses; being subject to examination and technological exploitation (natural resources) application.

With the framework of the Modern notion of “real objects” virtual reality is hardly real at all. The physical basis of a digital image is electrical impulses moving through electronic circuitry or an array of digital codes saved to a hard disk. However, if “real” also means effective in defining our sense of who we are and what the world is like; effective in defining flows of money, human attention and human relationships; effective in organizing our knowledge and running our machines, then the “reality” of virtual reality assumes more stature.

Assessing the reality of Postmodern virtual reality by the Modern standards of physical objects in space and time, therefore, could miss what is radically new and different about the electronic image. This leads to a second question. What is the difference between an electronic image and earlier communications technology like telephone or telegraph? Is digital imaging and virtual reality simply further development within the basic framework of Modern communication technology? I now discuss some examples to answer this question.

An Example: Virtual Community

The first paragraph of this essay identified some familiar examples of how the electronic images increasingly upstage the “real thing. “ We can try for a fuller picture of “virtual reality” with the example of a handicapped person participating, via the Internet (emails; chat rooms; cam recorders) in a virtual community of similarly handicapped people. This virtual community is almost like a flesh and blood community—experiences can be exchanged, information shared, a sense of belonging and being cared felt, video images and voices of members shared. Judged by the standards of Modern “real things”, this virtual community is less real than Modern “objects in space and time, ” because the flesh and blood bodies of the participants are not together in a physical room. However, for handicapped people, facing greater mobility problems, this non-required physical presence is not just a lack; the possibility of important features of community without physical presence is also an advantage.

However, the handicapped persons’ chat room is not categorically different from a conference telephone call. This illustrates how features of Modern real -time communication (telephone, telegraph, teleconferencing) overlap with new, digitally based communications technology.

Example: Chat Room

However, the Internet chat room shows differences between Modern telephoning and Postmodern Internet, even when visual images don’t play a role . An Internet chat room or older bulletin board has a virtual (almost the same as) existence. When I join a particular chat room, I don’t create a new connection, as when I dial a telephone number and try to reach someone by phone. The chat room is “always open” (granted, occasionally, no other use may be “in” the chat room at the moment.) It exists virtually in a way a telephone connection does not. This hints at us the decisive feature that makes Postmodern “virtual reality” different from the Modern world of objects in space and time. The chat room, even without current users users, has a continued existence; a potential user can log in to the chat room. When I join the chat room, I join something that already exists “out there” in cyberspace. Talking about this, I use the vocabulary of the Modern world of objects : room, exists, out there, space. But the chat room is not any place in space and time like my car is some place in space and time.

Example: Email

A similar example of virtual reality is electronic mail. My email box (is not a physical object, like my snail mail box, although it involves hardware (computers, servers, electrical connections) and companies that “provide” email service. My email box is not a physical object in space and time, yet it functions in many ways like my snail mailbox. It has an address: (davidscott1234@aol.com). People can send messages into my email box that I can retrieve, read, answer or ignore. The enormous popularity of email demonstrates that email has some advantages –speed, convenience, cost, accessibility– over snail mail, even if electronic mail lead many to worry about the deterioration of language usage in Postmodern society.

Example: Second Life

A final example brings out the differences best. The Internet platform “Second Life” (www.secondlife.com) offers users a parallel world in which they can exist and act as whatever identity they choose. In this “world,” accessible through downloadable software, users can create an identity (an avatar) and function with this new identity. . Relationships among these identities can be established; they can transact business using a currency that is convertible into US dollars; voyages from one part of this parallel world to another can be made. This virtual world is a human creation, but does not begin and end when one person calls another by phone. In this digitally based “world” not just objects are imaged but biological life , social spaces and social interaction are imaged. And Second Life may only be a foretaste of forms of virtual reality to come.

Having these examples in mind, we can move to the more abstract level defining “virtual.” One dictionary definition of “virtual” is “practically the same as ” or “for all practical purposes, the same as or as good as.” But, a key theme of Postmodern writers is that experiencing virtual reality is, in some respects, better than “real reality. “ Postmodern people increasingly prefer virtual reality to “real reality.” This is the cutting edge of the Postmodernists claim that virtual reality is “de-realizing” (making less real) the Modern “world of objects.” This feature is why Jean Baudrillard speaks of virtual reality as “hyper-reality.”

This example leads us to three of Baudrillard’s key ideas I present in this essay. He holds that digitally-based, virtual reality, is in specific senses more real that real objects (hyper-real). Second, he says that contemporary people are changing “real objects, ” including their own bodies, to bring them up to the standard of their digital images. Third, he says that this virtual reality is increasingly difficult to escape. We want to present these ideas in the second section of the Third Essay.

One Definition of Postmodernity

This particular essay is especially informed by a one scholar’s definition of Postmodernity:

Postmodernity….can be described as a set of critical, strategic and theoretical practices employing such concepts as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum and hyper-reality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress epistemic certainty and the univocity of meaning.“8

This terse and academic definition defines Postmodernity as a way of thinking (a set of intellectual “practices”) shared by a specific group of writers, who are then labeled “Postmodernists. “ These thinkers critically question specific Modern assumptions/certitudes/beliefs about “real things” as consisting in their “presence” to human subjects, as being identical with themselves through time, and therefore being truly knowable and possessing only one meaning (univocal meaning). Postmodern thinkers use strategies that “destabilizes” — upsets, calls into question, “problematize” , call for a rethinking —of these Modern assumptions about “real things.” This Third Essay, again in its two parts, focuses on the Postmodern insight that the electronic or digital image is changing our consciousness of what is real objects are and identifies implications for Christian identity and ministry.9

But, just as significant as the de-realization of the Modern object world, is the impact of this de-realization on Modern senses of personal and corporate identity. The key point here is that with the destabilizing of the object world as things enduringly present and disposable to human subjects, the Modern sense of human identity as a “subject” standing over against and experiencing a “world of objects” also becomes unstable. I hope to make the Postmodern critical questioning of Modern human subjectivity the subject of the Fourth essay in this series.

II. The Electronic Image

Three features distinguish the digital image from traditional analogue images —drawings, paintings, theater productions, maps, film-based photography and cinema. Digital images are representations of a two dimensional image; the electronic image , therefore, is an image of an image. Second, the digital image is, compared to the analogue image radically more alterable than the analogue image. Third, the digital image is, compared to the analogue image, radically more portable and accessible than the analogue image. Each of these three features of the digital image enables them to undermine people’s sense of “real objects” and to be used to generate an alternative “virtual world.”

Figure 1 My digital watch

As the image of an image, a digital image is twice removed from the original object or subject that it images. The analogue watch face typically arranges the numbers of twelve hours in a circle on its face. The longer arm points to the hours; the shorter one to the minutes. The twelve numbers arranged in the circle mirrors, in representational fashion, the twelve hours of each half-day, and the circular form image the movement of the earth about the sun and the turning of the earth on its axis. In many analogue clocks and watches, a window displays a number or word on a turning drum or wheel that names the day, month, and year. Again, this drum or wheel is an analogue of the moving and turning planet.

Figure 2 Your analogue watch

By contrast, the digital watch or clock displays only a set of numbers; giving the day, month and perhaps year. My $12.00 Timex also displays a blinking number, showing the seconds within each minute. By pressing a button on the side of my Timex watch, the date becomes visible. These numbers don’t mirror (serve as an analogy) the rotation of the earth on its axis or the movement of the earth around the sun. The digital image is, thus, fully disconnected from the real objects, earth and sun; the digital watch shows me free-gloating temporal quantities.

More technically stated, a digital image is a representation of a two-dimensional image as a finite set of digital values. The digital image “translates” a two-dimensional image into a binary code (a finite series of the numbers of “0” or “ 1”/off and on of an electrical current; opening or closing of a circuit). Each picture value, having its specific code, is called a pixel. The digital image consists of these pixels. If the image is applied to data associated with points scattered over a three-dimensional region, e.g., images produced by tomographic equipment used in medical diagnosis, each datum is called a voxel. Each pixel/ voxel of an image occupies a “position” in a two-dimensional region. In this position the pixel/vocal has a value consisting of one or more quantities related to that position. These quantities are called “samples.”

According to the number and nature of these samples digital images can be classified according to their nature. The most important of these different kinds of samples are gray scale; color; false-color; multi-spectral and thematic.

When discussing how digital images increasingly upstage and “de-realize” real objects in space and time, this contrast between digital and analogue imaging is important. The analogue image (other examples are the upside down image of a photographed object on photographic film; the artist’s rendition of his/her subject; the theatrical representation of people and situations in real life) keeps the viewer of the image connected to real things, real people and real events in the world. The image points to real objects and events. The digital image, as digitalized copy of a two -dimensional image, hides or cuts that relationship. Obviously, the digital image of my children, made by a digital camera, connects me to my children. But the connection is less “physical” or material. A traditional photographic image of my children represents a physical impact of light waves on a photographic plate or film, causing a chemical reaction. The digital image does not. The digital image creates a virtual reality, i.e., a reality that exists with a greater independence from the original than the analogue image.

The digital image is, secondly, more easily altered than the analogue image. Digital images can be synthesized from non-image data, such as mathematical data or three-dimensional geometric models. Thus, a whole field of digital image processing exists involving the algorithms (the sequence of steps that a program follows to process information) for digital image transformation. Of course paintings could be copied and changed; film photos could be retouched. But altering digital images is much easier. The reason is the digital construction of the electronic image and its capacity to be integrated into electronic software and hardware systems that allow their being altered. Among these electronic input devices and techniques are digital cameras, scanners, coordinate measuring machines and, of course, the computer which access the Internet. If only a trained expert could alter a traditional painting or photograph, the digital image can be accessed and easily altered by anyone who can buy a digital camera, computer, or scanner and digital photo software.

Digital images are so easily detached from real objects that two consequences follow. First, a viewer of a digital image in an electronic medium, e.g., an electronic image of a person accessed on the Internet, can’t be always sure what relation the digital image has to any “real” object, person or event in space and time. The digital image could be of a totally imaginary object or person. A photograph was always the image of something; the digital image need not be. Similarly, the viewer of a digital image, say one accessed in the Internet, can’t know if that image has any relation at all to what the image allegedly represents.

Figure 4 Photo of the author

Figure 5 Joan, my Austrian pen pal, sent me her photo

But, for our emerging Postmodern sense of what is real and what is not, the capacity of the enhanced or altered digital image to be integrated into other electronic messages and images is decisive for Baudrillard’s claim that images are becoming the standard for “real objects.” A good example is the use of digital imaging in advertising and marketing. Bavaria, a state in Germany, is marketed as a tourist attraction. Digital photos of Bavarian castles, villages, mountains, valleys, and men and women in Lederhosen and Dirndls are integrated with text to create a “Bavarian Brand.” This Bavarian Brand “pre-programs” expectations and the actual experience a tourist has if they physically visit the actual place, Bavaria. Of course, the mountains, villages, inhabitants and castles exist and can be experienced. But the “Bavarian experience, ” the brand, is the imagined experience planted in the minds and hearts of potential tourists and the actual inhabitants of Bavaria. This Bavarian experience, the virtual reality of Bavaria created by digital images, is what tourists will “capture” with their digital and video cameras to show themselves and their friends back home. These digitally captured pictures are the real tourist “experience” and the “Bavaria” that is economically, psychologically, sociologically and politically significant.

Figure 6 Our home in Bavaria

Figure 7 View from our living room

This second feature, its mutability, and thus its “artificial” (something made by humans) character, is directly related to a third feature of the digital image: its portability. The most important factor in this portability is the Internet, which makes digital images accessible to, in principle, anyone in the world who has access to the Internet. A second important factor for portability of digital images is the personal computer and the server where digital images can be stored, retrieved and then transmitted through electronic transmissions of many kinds, e.g., emails.

The second and third features of the digital image, their mutability and their portability combine to allow digital images to constitute a virtual reality. Virtual reality is an electronically generated reality having a radically reduced relation to real objects in space and time than Modern images. Nevertheless, the virtual domains created by digital images and accessible through electronic media, can have the same or at least similar reality effects as real objects in space and time.

II. Hyper-Reality, Makeover and Colonization of the Mind

Our purpose in this section is to spell out more fully the Baudrillard’s three key ideas about the relation of things and digital images. First we deal with his claim that digitally based images, codes and models are “upstaging” what in Modernity were known as “real objects in the world. We will follow Baudrillard as he says that digital images are often more vivid, entertaining and effective than real object.

We will develop this claim by dealing first with the Modern sense of the world of objects. Then we will discuss the concept of virtual reality as “hyper-reality.”

The Modern Sense of Objects

In the two first essay of this series we indicated that western Modernity covers hundreds of years and includes many different societies. Within this history of Modernity are great variety and radical oppositions, e.g., between Enlightenment Rationalism and Romantic Inwardness. Further, in the second essay, we underscored how our natural scientific worldview has changed from Copernican, Newtonian to contemporary models incorporating Einstein’s relativity theory. Given this great variety and historical development, we can speak in a limited sense only of a “Modern” notion of objects.

With this reservation in mind, however, we can rightly underscore how fundamental Renee Descartes’ teaching about subject and object has been for the whole Modern adventure from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Every review of Modern philosophy acknowledges that Renee Descartes’ distinction between thinking substance (res cogitans) and extended substance (res extensa) established an intellectual framework within which Modernity has developed its sense of things in the world. Thinking thing (res cogitans), Descartes held , constitutes the essence of human being. Extended thing (res extensa) is everything else in the world, including the human body. The resulting “world view” was dramatically simple. Only two kinds of realities exist: human subjects, whose essence were their minds or self-awareness, and extended objects , things whose size and weight can be measured and which can be perceived through the body’s senses. 10

At the level of ideas, Isaac Newton “solidified” this “world of objects” by determining the laws of motion, including the force of gravity which governed their interaction. These laws of motion, including such key terms as inertia, velocity, mass, acceleration, gravity, resistance, could be visualized by motion of billiard balls on a pool table hitting one another, every possible motion and position in principle being calculable, if the starting values were known. As is well known, this has been called the “mechanical world-view.” It governed science and ordinary perception until the twentieth century.

Within the late Modern physics, chemistry and biology, of course, a much more complicated model of the world of objects emerged. These disciplines developed models of atoms with nuclei, themselves composed of smaller particles, like quarks, and surrounded by electrons. Further complicating the picture of the “world of objects” was the discovery of biological evolution, of electromagnetic force, and of genetics structure and function. At the macro-level, the cosmos, Einstein’s General and Special Relativity Theories integrated the basic constituent factors gravity, time, mass and energy. In his Special Relativity Theory, published in 1905, Einstein claimed that time is not a constant, but a variable, depending on the velocity of a moving body. In the General Theory of Relativity, published in 1916, Einstein related gravitation to a bending of space and time. Thus at the micro level—the level of atoms— and at the cosmic level—the level of the interrelation of basic constituents of reality—time, space, mass, Entergy, gravity the scientific world view was richly developed and complicated.

Ordinary people, however, live their lives not at the micro or the cosmic levels. In their daily lives, they perceive the world largely in the Cartesian framework of objects confronting them as subjects. This view of “reality” governed the ordinary Modern person’s experience of both the objects in nature or the objects produced by human being, the world of technologically produced artifacts.

In ordinary life, moving through a framework of houses, cars, other bodies, etc., Modern people consider objects as solid things relating to each other by Newton’s laws of motion. And, fundamental for this relationship, Modern people related to things in this world as an array of objects to serve them: to serve their curiosity in scientific investigation, but above all to serve their will to mastery through technological exploitation.

Of course the world of objects, especially the world of nature, could be appreciated. The 17th and 18th century Deist could see in the order of Nature a witness to a benevolent, wise, though remote, Creator/Cause. The Romantic in the nineteenth and twentieth century could respond to the majesty of stars, mountains, rivers and forests with deep feelings of exaltation and mystery. But the major posture in relation to the world of objects was not appreciation but use: the objects of nature were resources to be exploited for human benefit; to be mined, moved or manipulated for human needs.

True, the late Modern period, possibly continuing an impulse from the Romantic Movement, began to challenge Descartes’ binary opposition between subject and object. In particular, many challenged Descartes’ subject object dichotomy as true of the relation between the human subject and the human body. Contemporary alternative medicine, drawing inspiration not only from the Romantic Movement, but from such Chinese philosophy as Taoism, also works with this holistic model. The late Modern environmental and the Feminist movements also champion a holistic model of the relation of self and body and of embodied self and nature. Possibly cultural historians will see in this late Modern holistic anthropology and ecology an early Postmodern voice.

From Equivalence to the “Disappearance of Objects”

Of course, human- made images of the world of real objects existed from prehistoric times. Postmodern writers provide, therefore, an account of the changes in how human images have related to real things. The two cultural commentators we draw on for this essay, Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard, each provide an account of how the relation between reality and image has changed over the course of history.

Many readers of this essay will know McLuhan’s depiction of three eras of media. His basic thesis in all his writings was that the form or means of communication, i.e., the medium, profoundly affects the receiver’s way of perceiving the world and also influences social organization. In his The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), McLuhan distinguished the oral/aural stage, the age of printing and the electronic age. Each of these stages marks a changing dominant means of communication and marks changes in human consciousness and human social organization.

McLuhan claimed that the emergence of electronic media is causing a cultural displacement; replacing, or better, over-laying, a Modern culture based on the printed word. In this emerging culture, immediate speaking, hearing and seeing via electronic media overlay and displace as dominant, the individualizing, observing, reflecting consciousness formed by a print culture. People continue to read books and other print media. But McLuhan sensed a change in human awareness and social organization caused by electronic media. The individualism and interiorization promoted by a print culture would be overlaid by a preference for the vividness of visual images and a new kind of collective identity would emerge: the sense of belonging to a ‘global village.’ 11

Analogous to McLuhan’s three stage cultural phases (aural/oral; print; electronic media) Jean Baudrillard has a three-phase analysis of the relation between image and reality. He calls these three Orders of Sign World. In the First Order, developing in the Renaissance, images served as equivalences of real objects, representing them but serving human relation to real objects. Baudrillard uses maps, so important for globe exploration, as an example of this first Order of images.

The second Order characterizes the Industrial Age. In this phase the image is not a representation of a real object but the repetition of real objects by means of technologies of mass production. In mass production, each Ford car images the previous one made. Characterizing the late phase of this second phase is the robot, which, programmed digitally, almost completely replaces the human worker. Unlike the first phase, where the map directed people to the real world of objects, to reproduced object is an example of repetition. Here, images don’t direct consciousness to objects, and in this sense serve objects. Rather, in industrial production the reproduced object signifies control over objects, the exploitation of natural objects by human objects for the sake of production and consumption.

Baudrillard’s third Order of signs emerges as digital images, codes and models, by means of electronic media, connect with one another to increasingly constitute a new Order of reality, a virtual world. We used examples to understand this new Order of signs in Part I of this essay. This is the “world” presented in the evening news with its text and video clips; these are the virtual communities the Internet12. In this third Order, images do not “re-spect” objects, directing our minds and attention behind the images themselves to the objects they represent. In this third Order, representative thinking, thinking that intends to correspond to a real world of objects beyond the consciousness, is passé. Rather, the interconnected images, codes and models form an alternative world. This alternative, virtual world is often more real, i.e., more interesting than the world of real objects because more aesthetically pleasing, more entertaining, more controllable, more accessible. In these senses, Baudrillard says, the digital image is hyper-real.

The digital image de-realizes the Cartesian world of objects first generating a virtual reality, an integrated set of images of real things, that comprehend our consciousness, that constitute a kind of world. While our bodies remain in the world of physical objects our consciousness, our imagination, our ideas, our emotions are directed by, evoked by and in some cases dominated by digital images, codes and models. This virtual reality gradually displaces the world of objects and events as our “real” world. These digital images, codes and models don’t direct our attention, our consciousness, back, beyond or behind themselves to physical objects, persons and events in Cartesian/Kantian space and time. Instead, this virtual reality increasingly is our world, constituting and defining our sense of what is real.

Changing the Thing to Attain its Image—the Makeover

Another of Baudrillard’s ideas is that the virtual world based on digital images so controls and dominates our contemporary consciousness that we change events and objects, and even ourselves, to “catch up with”, to conform to digital images. Increasingly electronic images are setting the standard of what real objects, including human beings, should be.

Familiar is the phenomenon of people changing themselves through cosmetic surgery and style changes to “catch up with” the digital images of what they might be. In some “reality” TV shows (a contradiction in terms?) people are presented who, with the help of experts, make themselves over to a more desired image. Where do these people obtain the image of themselves, to which they want to change themselves? David Bowie, but also many other pop musicians, adopt a series of images, hoping one of them will be marketable. Those responsible for the tourist industry in Bavaria work to make Bavaria conform to the Bavarian brand. One aspect of the Bavarian brand is “ a winter paradise for skiers.” The “real Bavaria must then be changed to “live up to” the image. Look out for the artificial snow machines!

In his earlier work, Baudrillard worked with the concept of “sign value.” By this he meant that the digital age requires a re-understanding of “goods.” Consumer goods– a house, a car, a wardrobe– but also investment goods— a corporate campus, a machine, a software —must be re-understood in the light of the emerging digital culture. Traditional Marxist analysis (which many Postmodernists know well but now are critical of) focused only on the contrast between exchange value (Tauschwert, an object or service’s market value) and use value (Gebrauchswert, what an object or service was useful for). Baudrillard insists that the digital age requires a sign value analysis of things. What identity, experience, and personal image do people associate with the things they own? Here, Baudrillard picked up the thinking of earlier cultural analysts who spoke of “conspicuous consumption” and of psychologists who addressed the theme of “the presentation of self” in every day life.

Contemporary marketing and advertising,13 in which digital images play a key role, are directly implicated in what Baudrillard calls “the sign value” of objects. A standard textbook on marketing describes the “marketing process” as having five steps. First is “understanding the marketplace and customer needs and wants.” Second is to “design a customer-driven marketing strategy”; third is to “construct a marketing program that delivers superior value”; third is to “build profitable relationships and create customer delight”; finally to “capture value from customers to create profits and customer quality.” 14 The phrase “creating and delivering superior value and creating customer delight” directly involves digital images. The key term is Brand or “branding.” A brand is an image that associates in the mind of a target (segment) audience a set of valuable experiences.

“Market offers,” the focus of advertising and marketing, are not physical objects , services, ideas, persons , as such. A market offer is a something the potential consumer will find valuable, and “value” refers not just to utility but also to an experience of enhanced existence. 15 One of the many examples the authors give is ads for the Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The Harley Davidson Corporation does not just produce and sell transportation machines. Their market offer is a “Harley Experience.” They are selling a certain experience, community and identity.

Figure 8 The author with his friends

Figure 9 One of the author’s Harleys

Based on advertising images I am pre-programmed by digital images to experience “independence, individuality, mobility, success, nature, adventure. I might think of ‘ the American west/ Route 66’; ‘being a real guy’; and belonging to a community (of fellow Harley owners).

How is this product experience provided? Of course the product itself, the motorcycle, is important. But the famous ads for Marlborough cigarettes show that no relation between the product and the experience (smoking a Marlborough and being living the cowboy life) need exist. But for the Harley experience the digital images provided on the Internet, in movies, in videos, in magazines are decisive. So, when I ride my Harley, which world am I in? The real world of physical things? Or a virtual world? Of course, I am in both worlds. But for the Harley experience, the electronic image is as important, or more important, than the motorcycle and the highway. The image informs me of what I am experiencing; it is defining my experience of “objects in space and time.”

Thus, Baudrillard thinks that the digital image is not “just a copy” of the real thing. In ways we have discussed, the “real thing” , real in governing our experience, the flows of our money and relationship, is the image. In Modernity, the object was the norm for its image; in Postmodernity, the image rules the object.

Baudrillard’s notion of sign value and of conforming objects to their images show how tightly digital reality is tied in with the global market economy. Opponents of globalization of market capitalism struggle to find effective ways to oppose it. Their struggle, says Baudrillard, is pointless. This brings us to a third of his major points.

Inescapability of Virtual Reality

We have spoken of the virtual world created by digital images. We have suggested, with Jean Baudrillard , that this virtual world increasingly puts real objects in space and time in the shade by being more accessible, more pleasing and powerful in promoting change of real objects to conform to their digitally expressed images. Now we want to develop Budrillard’s point that the virtual world based on the digital image is very difficult to escape.

The first sense in which the virtual world is ‘colonizing” our world of objects is straightforward. The digital image, digital coding and digital coding are everywhere. As in the Modern period (from the middle of the seventeenth until the middle of the twentieth century) European powers colonized the South America, Africa and Asia, so in the Postmodern age, digitally based images, codes and models are colonizing every aspect of our lives. This needs little elaboration. Politics, economics, marketing, education, sports, leisure travel, recreation, all forms of print media, industrial production, banking and finance, medical care, the military, every function of society one can name, including death and burial, finds the digital image and the electronic media at its center.

In the sixties and seventies, as digitalization and the computer came on the scene, some people who could afford a computer refused to join the crowd. Even today, some people who can afford a TV refuse to have one in their homes. But people who opt out of the digital revolution risk being left behind major domains of their own society or world. In education today, a library that is not computerized risks losing all contract with the network of libraries and book users. Families without a computer handicap their children in school, where computer skills are assumed and considered essential for participation in modern life. No physician, no sales clerk, no garbage collector or warehouse worker lacking computer skills can get a job. The gap between the poor and the rich in the world runs along the fault line of a nation’s connectivity.

But the virtual world is difficult to escape in a second, deeper sense. Many people, rightly, link digital images, coding and modeling with globalization and link globalization with global market capitalism. Indeed, everyone realizes that globalization in the contemporary sense of that word,16 is inconceivable without the information and communications revolution based on digital coding and represented by the electronic image. Global capitalism uses this communication technology to extend its reach. Opponents of global capitalism, therefore, become opponents of the digital culture. Baudrillard holds, however, that finding a foothold outside this virtual reality in order to analyze, rebel against it, ignore it, change it, is extremely difficult.

This unquestionable link between digitally-based communications /information technologies and the global marketplace raises an important question for social analysts. Is the digital image (as a symbol for IT and CT) simply a new tool for capitalism, while economic forces remain the foundations of reality, as Marx thought? If so, opponents of market capitalism will think that traditional Marxist categories —the proletarian revolution, production and consumption of goods and services, alienation of the work from his/her labor and thereby from their true humanity — remain relevant and useful. But Baudrillard says this is not, or no longer, so. The digital revolution is not just a neutral tool, part of society’s superstructure, while economic forces remain the real foundation of society. Baudrillard thinks the virtual world is actually changing the terms of people’s engagement with reality. He draws a conclusion about protesting against the digital culture.

Virtual reality’s ability to nullify protest against it is one of Jean Bauddrillard’s major themes in his later writings. Protesting against this virtual world is so ineffective, because protest, especially violent protest, evokes a wished-for and effective response within the new order of virtual reality. The digital age emasculates protest against it by including it in the virtual world, as another of its entertaining spectacles. Those of us involved in social protest in the Sixties called this being co-opted. Baudrillard calls it “the perfect crime.”

Thus, video clips of protests at conferences of globalizing institutions, IMF and World Bank, appear the next evening on the TV news for the “info-tainment” of viewers in their “ home entertainment centers.” As the news announcer reports a protest outside the hotel where IMF officials (or G-7 leaders, or conferences on world security) are meeting, the cameras are on hand for “live coverage.” Protesters are interviewed, dramatic shots of protester-police conflict are recorded; ideally a bleeding protester or police officer is filmed being rushed to an ambulance. The news producers couldn’t be happier; this will be the first item on the TV news, on AOL’s homepage, etc. The protesters, far from undermining the global system, provide needed resources for the most important of them (TV and the Internet).

The protestors become a spectacle, an event, info-tainment –central consumer products of the electronic media.

Virtual reality, symbolized by the electronic image, is hard to avoid. You can run, but you can’t hide. And, if you try to hide, you become a news item for the media; their representatives eagerly seek you out for an interview.

Conclusion:

In this essay we have claimed that Modern people’s relation to the object world, both nature and human-made artifacts, is changing. This change we claim, following cultural critics like Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard, involves a destabilizing of the object world by the growing power of a digitally based virtual world. We said that “virtual reality,” based on digital images, codes and models, is de-realizing, replacing, encroaching on the world of objects in three ways. First, the digital images of objects are in some contexts better than the real thing: —more accessible, more vivid, more usable, more influential in different ways. Second, people today are changing real objects, including their own bodies, to “catch up to” digital images of these realities. That is, the digital image is in some senses becoming the standard that real objects must meet, rather than the image being “just a copy” of the really real original. Third, we pointed out how difficult it is to live outside the world of virtual reality. On the one hand, virtual reality has such a universal presence and effectiveness, that not participating risks being left out and left behind in vital ways. On the other hand, protesting, resisting, and revolting against virtual reality in the name of some other values is copted by the electronic media. In these three ways, we argue, with Jean Baudrillard, that virtual reality, based on the digital image, is de-realizing, destabilizing what Moderns have taken as the standard of real things.

In the second essay of this series, we contrasted the Premodern way of perceiving the object world to the way of perceiving the object world beginning in the Enlightenment. St. Bonaventura’s or Thomas Aquinas’ description of how creatures direct the faithful mind beyond themselves to God, the Holy Trinity, is very different from Isaac Newton’s Deist view of physical objects or of Immanuel Kant’s “thing in itself.”

In the first essay in this series, we also pointed out the basic difference between a Deist/rationalist description of the object world and the Romantic perception in the following century. For Romantic poets William Wordsworth, or German Romantic painter Kasper Friedrich or New England Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson , nature was not just a collection of objects governed by Newton’s Laws of Motion waiting for human exploitation. Nature was a domain quickened by a universal and transcendent Spirit, which called to the depths of the human spirit.

These changes in how human subjects “experience” and relate to the world show that our human relation to “real things” can change; this relationship is not eternally fixed. We should not be surprised, therefore, that electronically mediated digital imagery is changing our relation to the object world again.

In this essay we are not claiming that avatars are spooking around in Cyberspace. We are not claiming that malevolent forces, e.g., global capitalism or a group conspiracy is at work behind the virtual reality encroaching on the Modern sense of “real objects.” We are not claiming that virtual reality, based on digital imagery, is the contemporary form of the Holy Spirit or of God’s will working in the Postmodern world. Our claim is much more modest but also very fundamental: a basic feature of the Postmodern era is a changing relation to nature and human- made objects, and the digital image, digital codes and digital models play a central role in this change.

This change is already having and will continue to have profound implications for the Christian community in the Postmodern age. How we perceive and relate to nature and their artifacts, both physical and mental, affect how they think of themselves, how they relate to others and how they relate to God. In the second half of this essay, scheduled for March 2007, we hope to focus on some of these implications of the emergence and encroachment by virtual reality for Christian identity and living.

The Rev. David Scott, Ph.D.

Professor of Theology and Ethics, Emeritus

Virginia Theological Seminary; Alexandria, VA, USA

Seattle, USA, Murnau, Germany

February 2007