studia universitatis babeş – bolyai dramatica teatru, film, media 2

STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI, DRAMATICA, LI, 2, 2006
THE EMERGENCE OF NEW MEDIA AND THE DEVELOPMENT
OF THE ARTS. REALITY CONCEPTS IN THE DIGITAL ERA
DIANA CHIOREANU
ABSTRACT. The setting for this essay is the digital era starting in the second half of the
20 th century, when the industrial–organic society transfers into the information/cultural
system as an effect of the emergence of new science and technology as well as
inherent shifts in what cognitive and social relations are concerned. The aesthetic and
philosophical reaction is one where perception becomes complexly mediated (and remediated),
while the systems of knowledge and the notion of reality are relocated into
the matrix of virtuality or its discursive match, hyper-reality. The study will try to discuss
how reality actuates within the informational era, what its means and message might
consist in and how digitization restructures the artistic poesis.
Digital Babylon: interactivity and open network
In a completely mediatized environment where communication equals
existence, the emergence of new technological media has been followed by
large-scale feedback (not only limited to prosperous occidental zones),
generating a totally self-reflexive socio-cultural setting that is overflowing with
uncontrollably multifaceted information relations. All reality in this system exists
as a non-linear power-knowledge set-up and it functions in a binomial
communicative model: input-output. It is a correspondence to Deleuze’s notion
of an information society based on inclusion-exclusion (into and from
information) which provides feedback, generate information and manipulate
data, in other words, interactive in the broadest sense of the word:
“Interactivity is similar to the degree of responsiveness, and examined as a
communication process in which each message is related to the previous
messages exchanged, and to the relation of those messages to the messages
preceding them. Sheizaf Rafaeli defined Interactivity as "an expression of the
extent that in a given series of communication exchanges, any third (or later)
transmission (or message) is related to the degree to which previous exchanges
referred to even earlier transmissions. Also, complex systems that detect and
react to human behavior are sometimes called interactive. Under this
perspective, interaction includes responses to human physical manipulation like
movement, body language, and/or changes in psychological states.” 1
1 Rafaeli, S. (1988). Interactivity: From new media to communication. In R. P. Hawkins, J. M.
Wiemann, & S. Pingree (Eds.), Sage Annual Review of Communication Research:
Advancing Communication Science: Merging Mass and Interpersonal Processes, 16, 110-
134. Beverly Hills: Sage.