REAL TIME: A MEASURE FOR THE COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION AND COMMUNITY
Fernando R. Contreras Medina

"We want to exalt the spirited emotion, the feverly wakefulness...and the punch. We declare that the magnificience of the world has improved with a definite beautifulness, the beautifulness of the speed, A race car...a roaring car wich seems to be running on a trail of shrapnel, it is more beautiful than the Victory over Samocracia" F.T. Marinetti. (Le Figaro, 20 febrary 1909)

The causes.

Both the cinematography and T.V. media has taught to the new multimedia how to build the audiovisual information.

If we stop to analize quickly the technical evolution of the speech about the photography, we will confirm the relation with the traditional painting; in the audiovisual technical, the movie uses the inheritance of the photography and theatre. At this point, we have the asimilition of the movies technicals in T.V.. And as the last , we have to link with the computer show as a compendium of the discoveries of the audiovisual information´s structures. At the elementary stage, all new technology needs the training created by the old technology.

With this, the computer-media, a computer-media made itself as a new communication media, is seen with problems that the last media carried. For what the discussion that generates the communication medias, finds a continuity in the new computer-systems when they are traslated like this. From the above, it comes that some questions can be known from the cientific community, however we want to point out our intention to limit the difference that we treat regarding to our text: the compilation of the problems are inherited into a more powerful technology.

When the information needed by technical support time aftertime that do not alter it, the computer-technology makes proud protesis that destroys the real happening (Virtual Reality - VR-, Desktop VR...).

We are sure of the difficulty that implies to get close to the reality, mainly if in the communication the mediation is unavoidable and consequently, the deforming of the fact transforming itself in which we call "reality".

To understand this difference, we have to consider that "real" is something that takes place somewhere and "reality" is to build up that "something" and either to brodcast or comunicate it. "Language is something that links among one and the other" (Cebrián Herreros, M., 1989: 182 and ss).

The communication has become the business of our age and the technology only complies with the neccesities of a society conditioned by the economy and real necesity to legitimize the social order nowadays.

The scientists are looking insistently for some application which gives a definitive sense in the communication world to the new computer media, without any previous studies of its possible effects. In pure speculations, they prove their applications following the proof-mistake system, in a society wich tends to the isolation of the citizen and is more and more afraid of the reality, as we prove in the new self media generation.

It seems that the Midas King mith is being revitalized. Midas who turned into gold everything he handed, also forgot that we need the reality to live and to feed ourselves (when he handled food and fruits, they became gold too). In a oblivion of the Nature, of the organic and natural, we go into an energetic universe, we go closer the knolegde through artificial protesis which brilliant and golden, bright succesfully to claim themselves the phylosophal stone, fountain of the human knowlegde.

In the fictionalition of the reality that the media trasmits, speed and real time both have become into a measure of triumph, in the race for the absence of real world.

We are facing to the unity that sizes the world from its capacity to show the reality without going out from our homes. Marshall McLuhan (1993:173) writes about the computer in his known Tetrades: "It accelerates the logical secuencial conjectures to the light speed", but he forgot to add that such speed would measure the reality of the humans or at least an aproximate knowlwegde to the real.

First reflections: The technic to produce.

Following Ellul´s theory, one of the origins of the actual sickness is found in "the growing of the technic by itself" (Winner, L. 1979:67). The technic progress is considered as one of the discoveries done following the social compass and the science, and other ways of practice and knowledge, the most simple improvements . The technique practices a selfgenerator process, the creation of a new way which makes possible and conditions the appearance of new ones.

In this determinist aportation, where it is proved that technique has made up a reality itself with its own rules, Langdon Winner shows many objections.

Without going into the technoevolution argument, we are going to metion the authors Roderick Seidenberg, Leslie White and their predecessor Henry Adams, to formulate an acceleration law where it is correct to apear of terms such as speed, time and energies. For these investigators, the thermodinamic and the definiton of entropy set the rules that regulate the historic development. "The acceleration of the technological and social development is described as a final and useful efervescence is a universe that goes to the termodinamic destruction" (Winner, L. 1979:75).

After these termodinamic theorists, the studies of the industrialization and modernity contain many different examples of references at the concepts of speed and acceleration. Since then, the processes of change do not come linked with the concepts of dynamism, technic evolution facing to the biologic evolution.

In the chain of contributions to the social science, they have appeared as atributes of the modernity, the dynamism, universality, omnipresence, unavoidance, irreversibility and true destiny.

The science and technic have contributed to the process of human acceleration with the contribution of genious who save time in their work or increase the production and multiply the benefits and services Gutenberg and his machine made possible the conservation of old hand-written papers.

The vapour machine used to be in fields during the last century and came into the cities carrying the vapour of the trains which contained thousand of passangers. Besides, it was introduced into many production processes. Electricity has turned up the night into day and the car roared through its streets. The combustion engine gave more importance to cars, it also generated the born of the submarine, the plane and many other discoveries.

The technical aceleration of the communication

The techniques of image-production have experimented an important evolution since the paints, chisel and hammer were used. In fact, these ways of working have been surpassed by the science aportation (as an example I would like to point the appearance of the airbrush or chisel connected to the compressor).

The photography comes to accelerate the slowness of these media. It itself has a change in the production speed, remember the famous slogan "Do it yourself" that Kodak makes of its snap camera. Since that, a way which is fulled by names as Polaroids (snap pictures) to the nowadays automatic pictures machines (selffocus, selfexposition). The speed that started with the vapour machine and mithified the Italian Futurisme, shows clearly in the production media of images. The photography incorporates the "driver" and "winder" engines, which machine-gun the objects, burts of negatives exponed to avoid the misssing of the fact, the action or the detail.

The cinema, as creator of secuences, is another machine gun of the reality that is renewaded with the T.V. The live-transmition shows the evolution of its "speed dimension".

The video image is excelled by the actual digital media which flows in our computers and the on-line transmition of the communication. In fact, "a technique dies when it is replaced by another one with better conditions", because any of these changes is interdependent, all of them form an only and primitive investigation: dedicated to the protesis of sublimininal comfort" (Virilio, P.,1988:70).

The image of syntesis-computer, daughter of the digital time, is the top of this race in the acceleration of the creation and transmition process, in the communicative process of the audiovisual way.

The personal computers build their speeches using map images (or real time, as it is named in the computer world) which may be removed and modified at the same speed.

With the images of computers some new terms come to join the audiovisual board, which implies a temporal measurement in its scientific aplication so,without a real time (or map time), it would not be completed the simulative dimension which its applications offer ( inrelation to videogames ot to telepresence experiments).

The speed effects.

The technology has given in this way, to the audiovisual world, the light speed, or at least it has not been behind the magic torch or the home T.V. 's back.

This new light, brighter and more poweful which prtends to iluminate the black points of its predecessors, covers all the reasonable doubts that come out from the technology of speed.

The acceleration that the infographic media suffers provokes the "ghost" nature of the synthetic images by computers, which we have been talking about. The message is ordered following the technic order and with the speed, the absence either of the person or the object are achieved.

In the play-games centers, there are many people in front of the screens, the players are ready to fight their challenge. While the virtual fight, their faces do not stop showing painful grimaces; while some others convulse their whole bodies, but all of them with no exception at all are under a hypnosis trance in the concentration to avoid being annoyed.

The high-standard sport persons also suffer this self-isolament to get a higher concentration where they feel the absence of the external world. For a few seconds, it is as if dream and reality were confused in a intermediate stage, they are concious of their actions, but totally unconscious of the external stimulus.

In the videogames, the seduction is collective in the watching action. The onlloker who are thronged behind the player´s back, are enraptured watching the screen, learning the tricks and even covetry the expert who goes beyond the levels and difficulties that he has exceded himsellf.

While playing with a videogame, the player day-dreams. The feels the seduction of having real sensations and being protected from the night-mare as well.

Maybe, the main attraction could be in the oppotunity to face the real life from the screen which is the battlefield and competition of the videogames and like this, to communicate ourselves with the external world using the ludic imagination. In this way, the computer is transformed into a big exponent of the player´s subjetivity who needs to create an sphere, a zone of experience where the stiffness and logic of the target lose in favour of his exigences, to his activities be much better.

The simultaneous informations from different natures (spare-time, work, education...) appear mixed for the experienced user who actives each one of them as if he made "zapping" in T.V. and, as we above explained, in the game of creating his own speed finds satisfaction.

But as in T.V., in the computer screen the real andsynthetic images appeared mixed as if they belonged to the same family. In fact, in publicity synthetic hiperrealistic images are used to remove the previously recorded and their classification.

It seems that the game extends to the indentification which it shows and doing this, the mass media lose their objetivity facing the own subjetive of a ludic activity.

It also happens that in the same screen where the player plays to kill, to destroy, to supperate dangers in the videogames, some aspects are introduced to improve their education. It means, different activities containing different messages together in the same joint (understood aas a a recognizable identity) with equal discursive rules. It happens the same with the information given enough the mass media, in which to the lose of the objetivity implied in its spectacularity we should add the subjetivity coming from the audience´s confussion that cannot believe so much technic tricks.

The 90´s started with terrible news about children in Europe (some of them really young) and students killed their friends to finish the games of rol1, where the intention to mix fiction and reality was stronger than the simulation of action.

Generally, the differences among leves are more and more confusing. The absence of lines between the fiction and real is increased by an engine that flings the men to the fit of madness of a new dimention.

Speed, another more characteristic of the computer age, where the computer is the new vehicle that rides us in the same space at different times as if we were walking on a never ending band, in the opposite way. Our inertia, our movement, let us in the same place and if we stop we are pushed back now, everything comes without having to move.

With this engine, the images pass as fast as those which we see through the window of the car; very fast and dizzy the computer transforms itself into a big showcase that does not need our movement to see the warehouse stock, the images do it to us. It is the dynamic of a static world, facing the dynamism of a movible source as it was the car.

Sitting in the cinema armchair, in front of the T.V. or in front of the computer screen, we move at a high speed without moving ourselves. The function of the audiovisual vehicle would substitute the physical travels, prolongation of a home movement, which its final consecuence would be a sendentary definitive. In this audiovisual travel; past, present and future2 images are mixed together.

The file of images gives the perception of a dissolved mixture in the some bowl, without temporal or material sense. The light of these images shows us anywhere in the world, any living being. The CD-ROM encyclopedia, spread knowledge through the bunch of the cathodic rays pipe, getting importance the unmateriality of the light face to the real perception. The facts and happenings which we detect from our organic view do not mind us any longer and we have changed them to those that generate our artificial protesis.

The social consequences

The ability of the masss media to show the reality is useful to transport it without the implied waste of energy used to move ourselves from one place to another. It also keeps the relationship with the enviorement and fictions power on the objects which it composes. It happens when we substitute a visit and in this way the movement and the physical movement, by a phone conversation, it means, by a mediatized conversation of being with the "other".

If the T.V. and the cinema, say the investigators, provoke the spectator´s solament, the possibility of "travelling" with the videoconference, the electronic mail and so on, they also have influence in the movement away from the reaality, of the human closeness, to the detriment of the contact with the reality and in favor to the absence.

Now we observe that the created artificial protesis to supplant the physical defects, carry on the way to the fisicas deficiences (emotionals and sentimentals). When we think in the daily effort of the T.V. to get close to the spectator as a friend, because it is always to his service and all the montage organized to stablish love relationship with the viewers, we only can feel chills knowing how the nowadays men hide their isolament.

The speed, facilitates from its dynamism these relation between spectation and media, as we shall see later. But we also have to point out that the technical improvements of the media in the supplantation of the reality, imply a certain religious done, because it evalues the speed veracity of the media from its blind faith, without subordinate it to the reason and the conscience.

We can´t forget how the great discoveries are events which belong to the conscience dominium better than the science.

Investigators and scientists such as Arquímedes, Newton or Einstein came to conclussions of the surprise watching the reality.

Among the various uses of the virtual reality, special mention should be done to the special help to paraplejic persons. These persons, without driving force, can in front of the computer screen and using their eyes movement, use a mouse to the different given options.

Not emphazising in these sickpersons' desesperation, I suppose that any help given to them is really welcome, to us this is a big example that being healthy human beings have to imitate the paraplejic´s desesperation because we also use protesis to stablish contact with the reality.

With the hasty of the information and its repietition in a window screen, Paul Virilio says: "The observation stimulous will disturb each time more extracting automatic and fastly them not only from the memory (internal light) but over all from the sight to the point that from which the light speed will limit the reading of information and the most important in the computer electronic would be which is shown in the screen and not that kept is memory". And is our isolament, the interest is lost in favour of the cinematic illusion, the mirage, the non-real.

In relation to this, Guy Debord (1990:40) explains when the built and chosen image by another one, turns itself in the principal way of the individual with the external enviroment with it detected by itself, is going to be the main base on the other´s dominum, because "inside of a image itself it could be juxtaposed without contradict anything".

Another one would be who goverins, the one who driects the rythm as in the continuous arbitrary surprise, "without letting time to think and apart from the spectator's thoughts and understandings" ( Debord, G., 1990: 41).

The CD-ROM, the computers and the scientific investigation with the application of the computer technology pretend the liberation of the cultures spare time ot the knowledge, are in the destruction of the thought, the conversation3

M.A. Vázquez Medel (1994: 61-72), shows some conclussions about on investigation of the new homomedia of the future, where he collects the anxiety of the aceleration that our technology provoces is the Universe. In this brief is told the possible changes on the human pattern now known from the ancient civilizations.

The computer fact and the generalization of the communication is gotten by the digilization of the information and its transmition to the light speed through the optical-fibres. " The changes that such processes will provoke, are going to affect all the structures and levels of the human existence: from the experience of space-time ( dislocation and distemporal) to the some self image and the human being"( Vázquez Medel, M.A.,1994).

The brief ends with two more conclussion, where a human being´s alternatives who swings between the insignificance or the possibility of getting a cosmic dimension is exposed. These possibilities development are fond in our desire not in the tecnologic innovation. Here reflection ( thought) and the educational proccesses ( the education) are those which will more the scales.

Some authors have compared the pointillism style with the pixelism, to explain us the lack of motivation in the infografic production. In fact, the tools simulation, of the point styles can be seen in softwares which include for example in its tools menu the painter´s name, this is the case of Van Gogh, in "Painter" for Macintosh ( Apple).

Even though the most proggresist authors of the cyberspace who uses the virtual reality to introduce the spectator in the masterpiece itself, they seem to forget as in Literture Lewis Carroll, goes through the mirror by Alicia´s hand, or as in the sixties, the active theatre, the performance, goes futher the scenary and makes the viewer to participate in the action.

But all these examples would tally with artistic demostrations. What is really important in Manuel Angel Vázquez Medel´s brief is how the acceleration, the persuassion of the brilliant, the atraction for a way of building, production and creation that uses the light as a component, can blind and atrophy the thought´s, the human´s reflection and the formation of men.

The educational system using digital technology based on general communication systems ( CD-ROM, CD-I, on line communication), may mean the unification in extreme of minds; the race to a colective soul build and the destruction of individual soul.

The information of the computer screen, is right this: information and not sensation; it consists to affer " the apatheia, that scientific impassivenens makes as more information is known by men, more extended is the dessert to his /her surround" ( Virilio, P.1988:51).

The unification is a colective soul has been the race to all the the artifitial protesis that men has been building throughout the history. Technic and clinic protesis, and almost all of them orientate to the sensorial world, have deformed the dimensions and representation systems.

In this way, the cinema and television image does not surprise us any longer and "the optical illusion are similar to life´s ones"( Virilio, P.1988:55).

Let´s quote the anthropologist John Kapelman´s investigations from Texas University ( Austin,the U.S.A.). Skull and human northemerican native rests are investigated in his laboratory. With this finality, he is using a new technique in which light bunches reflect in the skulls and X rays go through them. A computer follows the results and puts together the data regarding to the three dimention morphology of the objects." Just in some hours, these species, transform themselves into data achievement which are placed into CD-ROM or go into cabal repliques from the original" ( Powell, C.S. 1995:81-82).

The information will transmit itself through telephone to another universities to let students and teachers investigate the northamerican native through a digital raw material, light and volatile, without neither organic substratum nor mineral.

It exists a tendency in technic to the oblions of the physic material, of the watched nature and our pesence is the reality which goes to the absence of light speed, to superate this barricade .

With the information so well conserved, unmaterial, energetic, the real time of computers, goes into eternal time where nobody gets old because material does not descompose itself, where time does not exist, where life movement has not a begining and final position ( born and death). The technic is transformed into the new divisity where air faith should be lead in.

"EL PAIS" news ( wednesday, November 9, 1994) publishes an article about the interactive services of network and highways. It is named in it how the new multimedia systems will promote the telework will provide long distances medical test and will give access to video on demand, interactive games and home shoppings.

Reading this, we cannot forget to remember the sentence: "God is everywhere" and compare the invisible presence of the user to the Divine Presence. It is that the scientific achievement is a simulation of the sacred one, of the spiritual and inmaterial presence everywhere in the world that the computer technology gets to.

This new divine power is admired and praised as Marineti did with his car once upon a time, nowadays are the Rolling Stones who want to transmit a concert through the Internet system. "EL PAIS" news ( August 18 th, 1994) said "with a program of access to Internet you can join the concert from everywhere in the world".

In this sentence, it is summed up the main origin which generates the seduction of this mediatic technology: "... everywhere in the world". The speed was not a dimension that is further the artistic movements at the begining of the century, as it happened with futurisme. Today, nowadays we keep pushing the accelerator without knowing where to go, but with the happiess of movement, of inerce.

We have left ehe perception of the real world and it is agreeable to contemplate life from images, artifitial protesis each time faster and more complicated. The view throughout the train window has been substituted by the computer screen, more easy and isolated.

Final conclusions

Basing ourselves in the above exposed we can stablish:

a) The speed is a characterized quality of a new technology, main one to provoke an absence of the user the real world. In many ocassions, this absence is provoked by the disolution of the scoreboard between fiction and reality.

b) The real time to a machine is the instantaned time to men and turns itself into an omnipresence measurement of the world. This instantaneal time makes its necesity to live all the experiences at the same time, together, without thinking, with no checking. The user, in front of the multimedia computer screen, with a system made to educate will only interactive with the binary limitations of the computer and its programmer. These limitations would conditionate its own view of the world and its conduct.

c) The acceleration that electronic age is experimenting includers the isolament of the person in their own environment through a hypnotic process focussed to a disreality of the human being and communicate subliminal and satisfactory sensations, of its mutation into a kind of semi-God.

d) The speed of the new audiovisual vehicle, lets it be everywhere without the other one´s presence, of the third person who dissappears. A fake movement to the self-satisfaction, to the other one´s presence, of the third person who dissapears. A false movement to the self-satisfaction, to the self realization, a forgot of the human relationship within the community.

e) The dynamic of these audiovisual and computer systems provoke a hyperdisgregation of the community, a movement to the individual boneliness facing a cultural hyperhomogenization which promote a commor system to all the Universe. The global village gives finally into a global jail.

f) The last point, we should point the spectacular dimension so close this aerodynamic vehicle that seduces with the effect on the demostration or the academic development. This dimension grows the soft and surface4 materials. To sum up , we would like to stand out an apocalyptic discussion but a critic-reflection on the scientif objectives as well. Intentions that in our oppinion, are found the confussion of not separing the concepts of science, technic or idea and aplication.

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