I first ran across the work of Richard DeGrandpre in an article he wrote for the magazine, AdBusters. That magazine’s original editorial vision (which they seem to have forgotten in recent years) was to examine the ways in which the version of reality encouraged by advertising (and by other technnlogically mediated forms of communication) promotes habits of profoundly distorted perception.
The article I read by DeGrandpre was called “The Great Escape” (published in the March/April 2001 issue), in which DeGrandpre described experiments done in the 1930s by perception psychologist James Gibson. People were given glasses that distorted their vision, making straight lines seem curved. The subjects gradually compensated for the distortion of the lenses, and eventually, the curved lines seemed to be straight ones. When the glasses were removed, straight lines were perceived to be curving in the other direction.
DeGrandpre related this to the so-called beauty myth. Young women, he observed, have millions of exemplars from which to judge the sizes and shapes of the female body, yet this vast pool of reality is somehow overridden by a narrow band of hyper-reality. It’s a perfect match with the finding of Gibson’s classic study. Many young women, presented with their own image, fail to ‘see’ what appears on their retinas. Instead, as researchers have now documented, they often perceive a distorted, ‘fatter’ version of themselves. Again, their sense of reality derives from cumulative experience with the goal of adapting to whatever reality appears to be most pressing, or ‘valuable.’ Unfortunately, for many women, this ‘valued’ reality happens to make them sick.
DeGrandpre’s discussion was a helpful reminder of how much our perception of reality is conditioned by our cultural setting. This leads some postmodernists to insist that there is no reality, only socially constructed perceptions. An alternative reading, one which has many resonances in Scripture and the Christian tradition, is that there is a reality, and our cultural situatedness can either help us see it or deter us from seeing it. The glasses I am wearing right now enable me to see what the trees outside my window and the birds at my feeder actually do look like; they do not enable an arbitrary and entirely idiosyncratic view of the world. They put me in greater touch with reality.
Richard DeGrandpre was concerned in that article about the way in which virtual reality was becoming more attractive to people than real reality, a theme he pursued well in his 2001 book Digitopia: The Look of the New Digital You (Random House). As he wrote in his AdBusters article,
The mind isn’t some kind of computer that remains unchanged as cultural software runs through its cerebral circuits. Conscious reality changes as the software of everyday life changes, and remains changed thereafter. Whether it’s watching the tube, surfing the web, or viewing the latest special-effects flick, chronic exposure to simulated ideas, moods, and images conditions your sensibilities, albeit to different degrees, for how the real world should look, how fast it should go, and how you should feel when living in it. When a thousand points of light shine upon you in a commercial war for your thoughts, feelings, and wants, your mind adapts, accepts, and then, to feel stimulated, needs more. Kids twenty-five years ago forfeited their quarters to a video game called Pong. Pong is to Sony PlayStation 2 what a firecracker is to the atomic bomb. Virtual reality wires us for a virtual world. . . . As you adapt to the latest digital experiences, straying farther and farther from your home world of the here and now, that home world becomes less satisfying each time you return to it. Simply, the virtual becomes the only reality that counts.
Related reading and listening
- Cosmetic surgery and human perfectibility — Elizabeth Haiken examines the shift that occurred in 20th century America from a focus on developing character to a focus on developing “personality” and achieving physical perfection. (19 minutes)
- Beauty, the body, and the “true self” — FROM VOL. 62 Lilian Calles Barger shows the necessity and beauty of healthy embodiment and challenges gnostic ideas found in the church that particularly distort the experiences of women. (15 minutes)
- Paradoxical attitudes toward plastic — Jeffrey Meikle traces the technological, economic, and cultural development of plastic and relates it to the American value of authenticity. (15 minutes)
- Technology and the kingdom of God — FROM VOL. 63 Albert Borgmann (1937–2023) believes Christians have an obligation to discuss and discern the kind of world that technology creates and encourages. (12 minutes)
- The relationship between prudence and reality — In this lecture, Ken Myers explains how the virtue of prudence is fundamentally connected with a deep and anchored understanding of reality. (54 minutes)
- The recovery of true authority for societal flourishing — Michael Hanby addresses a confusion at the heart of our current cultural crisis: a conflation of the concepts of authority and power. (52 minutes)
- A fearful darkness in mind, heart, and spirit — Roberta Bayer draws on the work of George Parkin Grant (1918–1988) to argue that our “culture of death” must be countered with an understanding of reality based in love, redemptive suffering, and a recognition of limitations to individual control. (33 minutes)
- Questioning “conservatives” — John Lukacs asserts that believers in unending technological ‘progress’ can’t really be conservatives.
- Living into focus — As our lives are increasingly shaped by technologically defined ways of living, Arthur Boers discusses how we might choose focal practices that counter distraction and isolation. (32 minutes)
- Albert Borgmann, R.I.P. — Albert Borgmann argues that, despite its promise to the contrary, technology fails to provide meaning, significance, and coherence to our lives. (47 minutes)
- Art as aestheticism, love as eroticism, politics as totalitarianism — Augusto Del Noce on the “technological mindset” and the loss of the sense of transcendence
- The consoling hum of technological society — Jacques Ellul on the danger of confusing “technology” with “machines”
- What happens when the Machine stops? — David E. Nye provides a context for evaluating the prospect of life in the Metaverse
- Technological choices become culture — David E. Nye insists that societies do have choices about how they use technologies, but that once choices are made and established both politically and economically, a definite momentum is established. (19 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 141 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Grant Wythoff, Susanna Lee, Gerald R. Mcdermott, Carlos Eire, Kelly Kapic, and James Matthew Wilson
- The priority of paying attention — Maggie Jackson talks about the increased relevance of her 2008 book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (15 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 129 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Nicholas Carr, Robert Pogue Harrison, R. J. Snell, Norman Wirzba, Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski, and Peter Phillips
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 116 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stratford Caldecott, Fred Bahnson, Eric O. Jacobsen, J. Budziszewski, Brian Brock, and Allen Verhey
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 111 — FEATURED GUESTS: Siva Vaidhyanathan, John Fea, Ross Douthat, Ian Ker, Larry Woiwode, and Dana Gioia
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 108 — FEATURED GUESTS: Thomas Albert Howard, Jean Porter, Peter Augustine Lawler, Hans Boersma, Felicia Wu Song, and Elias Aboujaoude
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 89 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jerome Wakefield, Christopher Lane, Dan Blazer, Fred Turner, Barrett Fisher, and Thomas Hibbs
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 81 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, Joel James Shuman, Brian Volck, Russell Hittinger, Mark Noll, and Stephen Miller
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 48 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jon Butler, Gary Cross, Zygmunt Bauman, Pico Iyer, Richard Stivers, Larry Woiwode, Alan Jacobs, and James Trott
- The Word Made Scarce — Barry Sanders discusses teaching in the age of technology, the effects of literacy on society, and the links between illiteracy and violence. (54 minutes)
