The concept of reality in the age of digital media

Since 2005, digital media has redefined our relationship to reality. We now confuse our direct perceptions with images from others, creating an unprecedented confusion about what reality is.

A guard of honor to manufacture reality

The journalists, lined up on both sides of the street leading to the hospital, formed a sort of guard of honor for the reality they were about to manufacture in this tiny spot where the spotlight was pointed. The paradox was quite striking for the outside observer that I was at that moment. The immense surface of the city of Paris was deserted and all media attention was focused on one minuscule location. This was what would become the available narrative for the outside world. Without implying that what was about to unfold at this location was not of great political importance, I propose a philosophical perspective on this situation. What was to be reported as a reflection of world reality was taken from an infinitesimal part of objective external reality. That was what was striking.

The journalists in front of the entrance to the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital on Saturday, October 14, 2015, the morning after the Bataclan attacks, very focused on their attention to being able to capture the important event or rather the event to which they were going to give importance. Because if they had been elsewhere, if their attention had been diverted to another place, everyone’s reality would have been transformed.

The gap between two concepts of reality

Of course, everyone is aware that what the media transmit is only a focus on part of reality, with a filtering system of what seems most important in political, geopolitical, health, cultural or other terms. We trust professional actors in the media world to offer us filters that allow us pertinent judgment about reality that is obviously impossible to embrace in its entirety. They serve to define our reality, which becomes mixed, between that which comes from our direct perceptions and that which is related to us by trusted third parties.

And yet, despite this awareness present in everyone, especially among young people who were born into the world of digital media, the concept of reality has now been transformed much more profoundly. I hypothesize that the gap between the concept of mixed reality that I just described and the new concept of reality poses a serious political problem, which justifies my engagement in this reflection. I propose to define this new concept here, starting with an example taken 20 years ago.

The unconsciousness of the fact that the concept of reality has changed seems to me to open the door to abuses, authorize political excesses exclusively serving the very small number of people holding capital and to the detriment of citizenship, democracy, critical thinking, as well as personal and collective sovereignty.

2005: the invisible tipping point

The tipping point is located for me in December 2004 and February 2005, during two events: the tsunami in Phuket (Thailand) in December 2004 and the London metro attacks (United Kingdom) in February 2005.

For the first time in history, the images that circulated on the Internet of these events were videos made by the mobile phones of people present on site, and not by journalists. The video camera in mobile phones had just appeared in December 2004. The tsunami arrived so quickly, some tourists filmed it and sent their images by MMS to the other side of the world. And in the metro, trapped by the terrorists, the live information also came from filming what was happening inside by people, with their phones, who also sent them outside.

This might seem trivial, but from that moment on, the images we perceived through digital media networks changed origin. A new brush entered the palette. These narratives no longer emanated solely from information professionals, but also from ordinary citizens. We suddenly began to be able to be in the place of the eyes of people “like us,” as if we were having another direct experience of reality in a displaced way.

YouTube appears in April 2005. Facebook in October 2004. The massification of disintermediated communication between people via networks deployed massively and produced flourishing economies around the dissemination of amateur images, through their strong audience and the advertisements that were attached to them.

The trouble of identification

Let’s look at the old television in the living room. Mental reality, the representation we forged of the world around us, was a skillful balance between what we perceived directly by ourselves and the information that was transmitted to us indirectly, via the television.

But concerning amateur videos, this information presents itself as almost direct, almost as if we ourselves were filming. We can identify with the person who filmed with their mobile phone from the other side of the Bataclan, through their window, the panicked people screaming in the street. And this is where the bias that modifies the concept of reality is located.

Let’s explore this new identification process: we therefore put ourselves in the place of this person who filmed with their mobile phone. It’s as if we entered into a ubiquitous perception, that we could perceive reality from several places at once. The status of images inside the phone screen and images we see directly with our eyes merge. Reality changes, due to a sort of extension of direct perception.

Three terms for a complex equation

Finally, to be able to forge our representation of reality today, we have three terms:

• Our direct perception (what our eyes see),
• filtered information (journalists’ productions),
• and another perception experienced as almost direct (images of “real” people who capture reality with their phones).

But it’s very complex, because we know well that images from direct witnesses are also mediated, chosen, filtered. But journalists have not been mistaken and began 20 years ago to film themselves with mobile phones, to reduce the technical quality of certain images to give them this character of authenticity, which convinces viewers and increases audiences, through greater “authenticity.”

But viewers notice this approach. Which adds additional confusion. Is it a real person or is it a journalist disguised as a real person?

A hypothesis about proportions

These examples in the recent history of media allow me to propose the hypothesis that contemporary reality is proportionally much more nourished by media representations than by direct perceptions. I would say: one third direct perceptions and two thirds media representations. Before the recent period of digital media, it was the reverse: two thirds direct representations and one third media representations.

The concept of reality is therefore modified. The philosophical concept of reality was this balance between so-called objective information and direct perception. Today, as media space also contains disintermediated perceptions received directly from people, the concept of reality relates mainly to media representations and minimally to direct representations.

Yet, we continue to believe that reality would relate mainly to our perceptions and minimally to what the media transmit to us. And we continue to be made to believe that distant representations would be of the same order as our perceptions, which is a lie.

Paths for emancipation

What are the tools offered today to citizens to accompany them in understanding the world by themselves? These tools are often discredited:

• Having permanent awareness of who is the sender of information.
• Not believing that official information would have more veracity than unofficial information.
• Having the same critical perspective on all types of information.
• Working on awareness of how and why information is produced is not a “conspiracist” approach aimed at discrediting the work of professionals. On the contrary, it is an approach that aims to better understand it and better be able to judge it. Professionals can also, without realizing it, let themselves be carried away by false judgments, especially if they are propagated by official press agencies or by their employers.
• For information circulating on social networks, understanding that biases are strong and that people share things for a strong reason, conscious or unconscious.
• Accepting to be confronted equally with various opposing information sources.
• Trying to deactivate our confirmation biases, which is difficult because it’s dangerous for our identity.

This is a first path for a constructive approach. Not to go back to a definition of reality, it’s not about saying it was better before. The world is different today. The concept of reality is no longer the same as before digital media. We must learn to live in this new anthropological state of human beings and find the conceptual, philosophical and practical supports to be able to exercise our existence there in an emancipated, conscious and non-dominated way.