There’s one rather great passage in The Perfect Crime in which Baudrillard piles in on three of his technological bugbears simultaneously — High definition, Real Time and Interactivity — carelessly (or perhaps carefully) confusing these three ‘useless’ enhancements, which in practice, he believed, turn out to be painfully lossy...
“The highest definition of the medium corresponds to the lowest definition of the message...His grudge with interactivity is somewhat less precise, but he seems to be saying that there is a level of exchange in the real world, with its own natural rhythm, which is being clouded by these extra layers, and his way of characterising this is very much his own: “An interactive compulsion...which combines artificial insemination and premature ejaculation in the same operation.”
“It is merely a mania for making an image no longer an image or, in other words, it is precisely what removes a dimension from the real world...The more we move towards that perfect definition, that useless perfection, the more the power of illusion is lost.
“Real Time: the instantaneous proximity of the event and its double in information...Now, there is something obscene about the instant replication of an event, act or speech and their immediate transcription, for some degree of delay, pause or suspense is essential to thought and speech...there is a profound incompatibility between real time and the symbolic rule of exchange.”
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