Schizophrenia
Definition
Schizophrenia is a term used to describe a mental imbalance in human beings. Baudrillard's view of the schizophrenic mindset is useful for understanding how the modern human subject might feel when faced with a reality of information and instant access. "…The schizophrenic is not, as generally claimed, characterized by his loss of touch with reality," states Baudrillard, "but by the absolute proximity to and total instantaneousness with things, this overexposure to the transparency of the world'.[1]
Users of the Internet are exposed to this proximity and instantaneousness of all things. Under this definition, the human mindset is similar to that of schizophrenia. Thomas Eriksen wrote that “...the surplus of information has a powerful democratizing effect since it makes it impossible for the State or self-appointed elites to dictate which knowledge each of us should appropriate; at the same time, it has – for the exact same reason – fragmenting effects. A new scarce resource is coherence.”[2]
"Ours is a new form of schizophreniaʼ, concluded Baudrilliard of the current era, “the emergence of ʻan immanent promiscuity and the perpetual interconnection of all information and communication networksʼ leads to ʻa state of terror which is characteristic of the schizophrenicʼ, that of ʻan over-proximity of all thingsʼ[3].
“Whoever is able to filter and sort the information at his or her disposal, and is thereby able to discard ninety-nine per cent as irrelevant, wins this game – not whoever is able to remember the names of Russian rivers or African heads of state”. [4]
References
- ↑ Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Foreign Agents Series, Brooklyn, N.Y., Autonomedia, 1988. Pg. 27.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. Obsessive Egalitarianism to Pluralist Universalism? Options for Twenty-First Century Education. Keynote speech, NERA conference, University of Oslo and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam t, Oslo, 10 Mar. 2005.
