Actress: JetBlue landing was `surreal'
Hustle & Flow star Taryn Manning says watching TV at her seat as a JetBlue airliner circled the region for three hours before making an emergency landing was the most ``out-of-body experience I ever had.''
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The New York Times this morning said " what would Marshall Mcluhan Think ?" I wonder as well what Marshall McLuhan would think about the fact that the occupants of an airliner where observing on a television perhaps their own death.. To observe self and the moment from the 3rd horizon (see Paul Virilio).
As Virilio describes it the 3rd horizon is the television or the computer screen. We are participants in a world that encompasses more then just the immediate. Now as a species we see the world anywhere at anytime that we choose from live ducks swimming around only GOD KNOWS WHERE
It is all on the omnipolition , we have become mashed into one perspective from speed. Our ability to see the perspective of a camera man on the ground video taping the plane that we are setting on is entirely possible now. Our sense of place is irrelevant. Our sense of time is irrelevant as only the perceptual now is what we are capable of seeing. I can just as easily have a conversation with a friend on my laptop (seeing him face to face with a webcam) while he sits in a bar in Tokyo as I can with my neighbor ( I should say that the it is easier for me to have to conversation with my friend in Tokyo then my neighbor) My neighbor is drenched in a world that is not of my knowing, he speaks to me of baseball games and wrestling matches and highschool football scores and the latest jokes that he has downloaded from the internet. I have baptized myself in similar crap that he has never even hear of. The balkanization of the American ID has already begun. The arguments that TV CEO's used to protect the monopoly of big corporate media in the 1960's have already come to pass. One house to another block by block across this country the national ID no longer is dictated by THE BIG TV MEDIA
they have been "cooled" ( see McCulhan) from the effectiveness of communications of technologies. No longer do we need to sit on the laps Daddy Dan Rathers or Walter Cronkites to "tell us how it is" . We can see for ourselves, as if the plane we are all sitting on is about to crash. We are now free from information being dictated to us from "THEM" but have become children in trying to determine the importance and our place amongst all of the information that we have access to.
NEWS has become entertainment. Entertainment has become News. One of the problems that Gulf War veterans complained about upon their returning from the WAR in the 1990's was other Americans saying " I saw that on CNN" but we did not experience the HEAT nor the stench nor the possibility of DEATH. But we did see the bombs dropping the bullets being fired the embedded journalist broadcasting with a satellite dish strapped to their backs. WE SAW IT AS IF WE WERE THERE. This is what the experience of TV and the internet has given us the GREAT divide the Americans who are seeing the WAR AS GOOD and the Americans who see the WAR AS BAD.
we see the supporters of the war following the protestors of the war (click the link for the story) each side having a process and an understanding of the relative "truth" created from rhetorical devices ( written, spoken and visual) each side and each person firmly beliefs that the experience that they have witnessed or in some cases experience is strong enough to validate their position. The virtual position is becomes truth. The space where the reality of mens and women's lives and ID's can be figured and observed theoretically by all of us without harm to our own lives and our ownselves, We can then shape easily an Opinion about these FACTS without having to experience directly the process to come to the TRUTH. Perhaps now in the age of information or as I like to say transIDentity Opinion or direct experience is all that really matters.
