Welcome to the desert of the real

Posted on Jul 17, 2022

One of the most astonishing facts about new media is how much their content is dedicated on commenting other media. Commentary on games, commentary on people playings games, commentary on people watching people playing games etc. We kind of need a measure for this – something like “depth of hyperreality”. A documentary is level 0 hyperreal, a movie about the actual event the documentary is depicting level 1, two dudes on twitter watching the documentary level 2 etc. When it’s about fictional events (e.g. WH40K narration), the fiction is level 1 hyperreal, level 2 hyperreal is youtubers commenting on the fiction, level 3 hyperreal an article writing about the youtubers commenting on the fiction. I wonder how deep it can get.