Did You Get My Reaction?
- Feb 23, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 19
Hyperreality at Waimea Bay
There’s a surf event called “The Eddie” on the North Shore of Oahu that happens only if nature cooperates. And what I mean by nature cooperating is that the waves need to be at least 40 feet high. It’s the premier big surfing event in the world and has only been held 11 times.
A few years ago, I found myself in the lucky position to witness the event. I got there early and staked out my spot, and as the competition began, I noticed something I hadn’t expected. Most of the people around me were live streaming the event through their phones (and some with drones, although they are illegal). Not only that, many were barely paying attention to the surfing, too busy interviewing each other for various feeds.
Here I was, sitting on the peninsula overlooking Waimea Bay watching nature at its most sublime. The best surfers in the world were putting their lives on the line. And yet it seemed like people were experiencing a different event entirely. The attention wasn’t on the surfing event at all, but rather in how it could be presented to the world.
It got me thinking. Something is definitely going on. It seems like we're increasingly interacting with representations of reality instead of reality itself.
Renée DiResta recently made a comparison between social media and murmurations that makes a lot of sense.
Murmurations are those amazing flocks of starlings that twist and turn through the sky as if they are a single organism. Each bird responds to the birds around it. No one is in charge. The pattern emerges from countless tiny interactions.
As DiResta puts it:
"The behavior is determined by the structure of the network, which shapes the behavior of the network, which shapes the structure, and so on."
This is exactly the way social media works. The difference is that these networks, rather than being shaped by instinct like with the birds, they're shaped by algorithms. And the single objective of these algorithms is to keep our attention.
That brings us to an observation by media theorist John Culkin:
"We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us."
The platforms shape what we see. What we see shapes what we think about. What we think about shapes how we act. There’s this feedback loop, so that eventually the line between reality and the representation of reality starts to blur.
Jean Baudrillard had a good name for this: hyperreality.
"It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality."
In other words, the map or Strava feed slowly becomes more important than the actual land you’re traversing. The image becomes more important than the thing itself.
I remember hearing one influencer ask frantically “Did you get it? Do you get my reaction?” When his cameraman said “No,” he was so disappointed.
”Oh well, it’s like it never happened.”
The feed had become more important than the event. That’s really what struck me while watching The Eddie. A lot of the people weren't really watching the waves.
They were watching themselves watching the waves.
There is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to capture a moment. The problem is that every act of capture creates a little distance. If you’ve ever been the designated photographer at a party or something, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You're there, but you're also not quite there.
The danger isn't that technology makes things fake, it’s that it can pull our attention away from the things we originally cared about. And we’ve all been there. I remember spending an entire concert trying to capture those big moments, only to realize afterwards that I had never fully experienced it. I have probably an hour of concert footage on my phone that I've never even looked at.
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