Borges, maps and videotape

Cheap, portable and easy to use – this is the future of videotaping. The technology and art of videotaping will be so accessible and portable that we will be recording our lives not only with one camera, but a whole bunch of them.

The word “tape” is destined to become anachronistic, since magnetic tape is slowly being replaced by media cards and discs. Cameras will be implanted in our bodies and record directly to artificial neurons implanted in our brains. Of course these cameras will even be implanted in the bodies of our families and friends, too.

We can then examine our lives from various downloaded points of view, and if we hire a dedicated staff of skilled producers, writers and directors, we can watch our lives unfold with instant commentary. There’s only one catch: will we ever have time for these and will it be useful at all?

Webcams and spycams are already making this possible. The breath-taking nature photography featured in Discovery Channel and National Geographic have been made possible through these breakthroughs in technology.

In one story I watched, a small camera was strapped onto a dolphin, revealing more about these creatures than researchers bargained for. For instance, they saw on tape how dolphins have courtship patterns almost as elaborate as those of humans, and the whole dolphin community actually share responsibilities in the upbringing of their young.

Another exciting story was told of a termite colony – by inserting a flexible fiber-optic camera through the intricate tunnels of the colony.

There are various implications to having our lives permeated (invaded?) by cameras. As we more and more record our lives, the recordings themselves become useless, therefore cancelling out the original purpose of our lives, which was to capture the highlights of our lives. Thinking about this quandary reveals more about the nature of media and reality. Let me turn to a little piece of fiction written by Jorge Luis Borges, that master of enlightenment by convolution.

In A Universal History of Infamy, Borges concocted a hypothetical Empire where… “the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.”

In short, map-making became so exact that it was entirely possible to reproduce a place with intricate detail. The technology advanced so much that they were eventually able to make a map that reproduced the entire Empire exactly as it was. Point by point, stone by stone, building by building. Of course, the succeeding generations found the map useless, the way most young people now find their text books irrelevant (grin).

There are many ways to read Borges’s Buddhist-like theme. One of the easiest is to replace the word “map” with “video recording” or “history” or “Reality TV”. We gain an insight about our how we perceive Reality -- that it is just, in itself, another map reconstructed from the collective recordings of various people.

At this point, dear reader, either you are about to nod off to sleep or have turned to the sports page or are wondering where the hell I am leading this discussion to.

So let me be quick to cite something easier to grasp: Imagine how the people in Survivor must feel, especially those in the subsequent Survivor shows. Are they “acting for real” or “really for real” or have they prepared for this contest by creating rough scripts, based on what they have seen in previous Survivor shows?

Here’s another one: my mother is perennially worried about my safety in the city because her favorite news shows are the Metro portions of TV Patrol and Unang Hirit, whose specialties are kanto rumbles, murders by drug addicts and the usual misadventures of city misfits.

Our reality is affected by media whenever we yearn for the experts of CSI to solve our celebrity murder cases, or expect the Sex Bomb dancers to perform in real life the way they perform on TV. We are pleasantly surprised to learn that kontrabidas are mabait in real life and get shattered to know that our matinee idols are mataray in real life.

And so we turn to you, dear reader. When you take your eyes away from the TV set, did your reality just get slightly remolded by the reality that was presented on TV?