Below, I’ll try my best to represent the scattered thoughts I have at the moment for potential paper topics. Bare with me, as, in hindsight, I meander in the middle sections (or maybe everywhere), as I’m still working through many of these ideas. But, I think that, by the end, I do consolidate these threads into a larger, if still imperfect, research question. As far as help, general suggestions on further readers for keywords mentioned below is always helpful. As the draft comes together, clarity of terms and context is always a concern when I talk about unfamiliar media.

One metaphor that several of the writers this semester have employed uses spatial language to describe our collective relationship to media and mediation. I first recognized it in Benjamin, with his mention of closeness, a section of text that I featured heavily in a blog post on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”–and a post where Anne called into question my reading of the term as a positive concept (i.e. that being “close” to objects and their representations is a good thing for the proletariat in Benjamin’s view). As I still haven’t figured out how to read this “close”-ness, I feel the want to explore it more.

Early in the first section of Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, he focuses on the separation of reality from a part of lived life to “unfold[ing] in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation” (Thesis 2). Upon reading this, I was immediately reminded of Benjamin’s “close,” but not necessarily because it seems to be as opposite as close and separated might seem to imply. (Again, I’m in need of revisiting Benjamin.) One way “into” a concrete discussion of these ideas might be to analyze one of the concepts the Debord ties to this spectacular separation: the manifestation and perception of reality.

This is where my interest in alternate reality games forces itself onto the screen. Debord goes on to write that “the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not something added to the real world… it is the very heart of society’s real unreality” (Thesis 6). This paradoxical “real unreality” encourages me to analyze the ARG as a type of spectacle, or, moreover, as a genre that resonates with some because it can be situated into a society of the spectacle. The connection is more than the convenience of the term “real unreality” or Debord’s continual use of the word “reality” early in his book; I see this pull between “close” in Benjamin and “separate” yet “unified” in Debord as potentially leading to some understanding of immersion–a relationship between humans and media that Jane McGonigal argues to be one of the key features of the ARG genre. While Debord and Benjamin do not explicitly address immersion as such, the ubiquity of images in the mechanical and post-mechanical economy and our ability to distinguish between original and reproduction (and the perhaps artificial distinction between the two categories) are of key concern to both. And, as Paul Virilio argues in The Information Bomb, the predominance of images, especially those mediated by digital networked technology, create an immersing effect of overlapping virtual realities.
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