The Ecstasy of Communication by Jean Baudrillard speaks about our ever-revealing culture perpetuated by the televisual medium. We have been transported into a new realm where the virtual has overtaken the real and the real becomes abandoned. Our search for individuality has cost us the relationships to each other and to the other than human presences. Everything in our created environments slowly become the processor and the partner of our lives. The distance that we create between the virtual and the real has distorted our reality and created a fronted, soulless existence. Everything is beyond arms length and we put it there. The homogeneity of this techno conglomeration alleviates only the perceived annoyances of everyday. We can now sync everything. But all this time savings leaves us with time for what? More time saving activities, for what? Why are we trying to save time then? (maybe slightly off topic)
Baudrillard pursues the idea that the sense of mystery in life is now being bought and sold at an alarming pace and that our secrets as humans are now readily available. There is no more seduction in our lives because of TV. The bombardment of image and sound has ended the fantasy. We have become observers and not participants.
Encoding and Decoding provides a look at the way messages in the media are translated through the different stages of its life cycle: ie. production-circulation-distribution-consumption-reproduction. The relationship between pure event and our reception represents a whittled or a "Cole's notes" version of the information passed where each translation from stage to stage changes the information to find its universal identity as the message to be received.
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I would like to comment on your paragraph about lack of seduction in relation to t.v. and the destruction of fantasy by means of overstimulation, as well as our role as observers rather than participants.
In talking about this you further clarified for me Baudrillard's dichotomy between the past world of 'hot sexual obscenity' and the present of 'cold and communicational' obscenity as being of two separate roots. By collapsing the experience of seduction into the manufactured world of the t.v., we are theoretically imagining intimacies which have none of the tactile information associated with the unfolding occurences of reality. Not only this, we are forced to limit our responses since a) so many of these constructed romances are not actually desired by the viewer (for an extreme example, I once saw Val Kilmer kissing on the 9 ft Imax screen and didn't like it.)and b)if we were to actually physically respond it would be in most cases socially depraved I think that we are forced to take on the role of observer in order to even be able to process the overwhelming sea of discordant body parts. Does this truly affect our actual physical desires? I think it may affect how we communicate them. I think these television 'sessions' arise out of what Baudrillard calls 'superficial saturation'. We are actually starving.
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