002. Brainstorming Social Media

I’ve loved Natalie Wood since I first watched Miracle on 34th Street, but I never before realized that her final film also happened to the be the seminal “virtual reality” movie. (“Virtual reality movie” meaning a movie ABOUT virtual reality, not utilizing it directly: come on, let’s be serious, this was in 1983). The ideas about virtual reality contained within Brainstorm now seem strangely earthy and quaint … the quaintness, at least, is unsurprising for a movie that’s twenty-seven years old. Still, I’m fascinated by the intimacy of the virtual reality in Brainstorm. Rather than a whole new immersive world (a world experienced in as many different ways by its users as the actual world), the virtual reality in Brainstorm functions by recording the experiences of one single individual and then allowing other people to experience this very specific mindset (via an elaborated helmet).

The virtual reality in this world is far more familiar and particular than the concept of virtual reality that I know in 2010. This is less a desire to “enter a whole new world” than to “become somebody else” … and not to become an improved version of yourself, or, alternatively, to become a whole new construct, but to experience the very exact mindset of a pre-existing human being. Psychologically, this idea is both embarrassing and thrilling at once. Compared to the sleek futuristic vistas of virtual worlds I’ve grown up imagining, taking on the mindset of a specific stranger feels rooted in something primal. If the majority of our art and entertainment has been geared towards allowing us inside the brain of another person (even if it’s a fictional person), then the world of Brainstorm is one of wish-fulfillment made miraculously, if a little awkwardly, possible.

In the real world,  even today, a virtual reality machine like Brainstorm‘s would be dizzying with its implications: voyeurism or empathy? The movie was created before the advent of widespread personal internet access … seen through the new lens of Web 2.0, a dizzying landscape of connectivity that the creators of Brainstorm couldn’t have anticipated, the narrative takes on an interesting new symbolism. Although virtual reality continues to develop, Brainstorm isn’t focused on the concepts we currently connect with virtual reality (i.e., avatars). Instead, I see it as sharing another characteristic of modern-day social media, which is our ability to access another person’s interiority. Social media has made accessing the minds, experiences, and opinions of a million strangers easier than ever before. Our appetite for seeing into each others’ minds has been whetted (and I’d argue that even the naysayers are so casually accustomed to our atmosphere of constant sharing that they might be startled if it ended). But it’s hard to ignore that social media is also performative, self-selective, and self-policed: despite the symbolic similarities, saying that reading a Twitter is like entering someone else’s mind is too huge a leap to have much impact.

What I wonder about is whether or not this current trend of social media will form the evolving landscape of technology in other ways. Even if we’ve developed to the point of virtual reality worlds, I’m curious to know if we’ll be content until we have a system like the one in Brainstorm, where we can perfectly record our experiences and transfer them, unfiltered and raw and objective, to a new person? It still sounds as far-fetched now as in 1983, but I’d argue it also sounds just as thrilling and possibly has even more relevance to our collective mindset. Many social media users casually and humorously use terms like “stalking” or “voyeurism” to describe their social media activities, but these terms still reveal the underlying theme of desiring  an easy access to each others’ minds and lives. The criticisms against such easy access are numerous and well-known — that we’ve lost true connection in favor of quick, impersonal updates into one another’s lives — and I imagine that Brainstorm‘s device would level even more complaints.  This entire post is fanciful and highly theoretical (in case you hadn’t noticed), but even beyond practical engagement with social media tools, I love to consider the psychological, societal, and, yes, pop-cultural implications of a world inundated with social media.