US society’s speed and image-saturation have displaced causal depth by surface effects.
Evidence
Baudrillard (1986), never afraid to exaggerate, considers the United States as a society so given over to speed, motion, cinematic images, and technological fixes as to have created a crisis of explanatory logic. It represents, he suggests, ‘the triumph of effect over cause, of instantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of surface and of pure objectivization over the depth of desire.’ — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1840
Categorization
- QUESTION: Worth chasing whether this Baudrillard effect-over-cause claim is empirically testable or purely rhetorical.
- XREF: connects to: People act on media-formed images of reality more than on direct experience. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 714; When aesthetic judgment favors space over time, spatial practices dominate social action. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1300; Immediacy as cultural style derives from space-time compression in capitalism. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 60 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- People act largely on mediated images rather than direct experience
#corroborates(0.88) - People act on media-formed images of reality more than on direct experience.
#corroborates(0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 714 - Immediacy as cultural style derives from space-time compression in capitalism.
#corroborates(0.80) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 60 - When aesthetic judgment favors space over time, spatial practices dominate social action.
#expands(0.75) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1300 - Economic arrangements of image circulation industrially produce narcissistic structure.
#expands(0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 90