DEREALIZATION 3)4)
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The artificialization of our contact with the real world due to the growing use of communication technologies.
C. EMMECHE explains this as follows: "The mass media create their own world, an hyper-reality where the gap between image and reality is erased because everything is mediated, filtered through commentators, news bureaus, images, standardized analyses, talk shows, and events hat are chosen and staged for the occasion. The media coverage of an event becomes the event's simulation, a complicated game that for all parties becomes more real than reality itself" (1994, p.158-9)
"Simulation", with its different psycho-social and computer science shades of meaning, is of course becoming one of the master concepts of our time. One could however think that in the whole span of existence of human race, our view of the "real" world has always been perceived and simulated - through the filters of myths, religions, philosophies or ideologies, as instruments to insure the cohesion of socio-cultural systems. So-called "derealization" seems in fact to be the contemporary way to generate a new kind of self-reproducing (autopoietic) "social cocoon", which appears to have been an ever permanent feature of social and cultural human systems.
From the cybernetic and systemic viewpoint, a deeper epistemological evaluation of the origins and the scientific and social nature of our models would be important. The emergence of the systemic-cybernetic approach probably signals a decisive mutation for the understanding of the collective behavior of human masses.
The new situation itself would thus generate the conceptual tools for its own understanding.
Categories
- 1) General information
- 2) Methodology or model
- 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
- 4) Human sciences
- 5) Discipline oriented
Publisher
Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).
To cite this page, please use the following information:
Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]
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