What does VJing say about our world?

If we look beyond the purely formal implications and questions raised by VJing, we can ask what does VJing say about our world and our culture. We can be certain that VJing did not emerge only because of the evolution of technology, but also because it reflects particluar changes that have happened in western culture. What are these changes?

It would take a whole thesis to talk about them, but we can try to make a short list of things that have radically changed:

1. The crisis of the narrative format: while narratives are still going strong, they exist almos exclusively in the realm of entertainment. Narrations are no longer the way in which a (western) culture makes sense of reality, basically because lies and half-truths have taken over, in an overwhelming way. Narratives have fallen almost completely under the shadow of fiction.

2. Information overload in our daily lives, and our incapability of grasping everything. Lower attention spans and fragmentation are direct and visible consequences of this.

3. Crisis of leadership and a growing questioning of authority. If the author is no longer the authority and everything has been (at least potentially) opened to questioning, can we seriously expect to have the final word on anything, even our own "inventions"?

4. The desire to break up the old, establsihed assumptions. The deeply capitalist desire of being new and original. Why make cinema when I can re-invent it? In western countries, individuals have the illusion of being self-sufficient, but also face the pressing dilemma of "coming up with something different and exciting", or being condemned to rot among the grey masses.

5. According to Vilém Flusser[1], we can imagine culture as a gigantic transcoder, which has texts for inputs and images for outputs. Our images no longer represent the world directly, but rather they represent ideas about the world. An image does not correspond directly to a thing, but to the cultural discourse that has grown from that thing. Images, then, have become a new way of writing in western cultures.

What else?

[1] Vilem Flusser "The future of writing", in "Writings (Electronic Mediations)". University of Minnesota Press, 2002.