The Black Hole of Hyperreality

Lynette Huang

At the beginning of 2020, the world seems to be caught in a vortex of madness, and another fever happens every day. Pandemic, power politics, George Floyd's death, and so on have shocked us again and again. I was locked at home; my brain was overwhelmed by terrifying news, and my soul was crushed by pessimism. Then, I would open the app - RED every time I was on the verge of mental collapse. I escaped to the world in RED because there will always be peace and beauty with all kinds of commodities. People always sing the eternal lyrics of "don't miss it" and "you have to buy this." I could just let my brain rest and let my eyes enjoy this perfect visual feast. But when I closed the app, I would feel more empty and angry at people in the app and myself: "how could you still care about which dress to buy when the world is collapsing?!" However, it wouldn't stop me from opening up the app again.

What kind of utopian world is RED? It's a Chinese social media platform created for users to share their personal lives and product reviews. Since its establishment in 2013, it has gained popularity among young female-dominated users. 83.31% of users are between 18 and 34 years old, and 90.41% are female. It strongly encourages users to post their fun experiences and feedback on anything in pictures and texts, just like Instagram or Yelp. The system undoubtedly attracts a large audience of viewers who are tired of evident advertisements. The audiences build trust with the publishers, who seem ordinary people, and get influenced by their authentic experiences and genuine feedback. At the same time, it has a robust suggestive algorithm, which shows a personalized feed. This app intends to allow users to find the best options here, no matter what information they need - restaurant recommendations, travel inspiration, fashion suggestions, or even learning methods.

However, what's on the back of this utopia world? Where there is high traffic, advertisers follow. Advertisers found that it's the best platform to promote merchandise and marketing because consumers trust the reviews from ordinary people. Gradually, advertisers started to pay those influencer publishers for favorable reviews of their products. The advertisements are camouflaged in these reports that still seem genuine. Here, an influencer economy has formed and been boosted by marketing and branding, where the supremacy of consumerism is spreading unwittingly. In addition, as the influence of this app expands (monthly active users have reached 200 million), the target of marketing has exceeded the product and has risen to the publishers' identities. They know that being unique, appealing, and personal helps gain more traffic to expand their influence and advertising paychecks. Therefore, they work really hard presenting their dreamlike aesthetics, beliefs, personality traits, and so on while using highly provocative words to seek and attract the audience. As an audience, though I knew that the fancy photos and statements have marketing purposes, I couldn't help enjoying looking at them and being attracted to some of the products. Though I knew the images mainly were likely edited and sophisticatedly presented, I couldn't help comparing my life to theirs. Even worse, I realized that I would spend 4 hours a day on this app to escape from thinking of other craziness happening in my physical life. Scrolling and scrolling…I let myself sink into this beautiful and thoughtless virtual black hole. How did this happen?

The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard argues that in the modern world, especially in postmodern consumer and media culture, what something represents has become more important than what it actually is. The subject is led away by the object. The simulations, which were the projection of reality, now replace the origins and become what he states as "hyperreal." This kind of social media platform intensely blurs the lines between simulation and reality, influencing the day-to-day experiences of those exposed to it. The publishers struggle with presenting the perfect simulation of their life in front of cameras; the audiences struggle with how to make their life as beautiful as the simulations they see. Vlog (video blog) is a popular media on this app (as well as on Youtube), which presents the publisher's day-to-day life in a video diary form. Every clip seems to capture the publisher's real life. They talk to the camera as if they were talking to a close friend. In front of the camera, their life seems dreamlike to young females - where there is always a beautiful and clean home, stunning appearance, enjoyable weather, and limitless new clothes and products. It's a perfect world with mere stress and problems to deal with. Vlog is also the upgraded version of voyeuristic apps satisfying my curiosity about other people's life. I would spend hours aimlessly trawling through random people's videos. But sometimes, I wonder how tiring it could be to care about camera angles all the time?

At the same time, the main screen of this app is the personalized recommendation feed tailored by algorithms so that users can stay on it longer. Its algorithm mechanism is similar to TikTok - recommending posts to users by collecting and analyzing their behaviors on the platform, including engagements on posts, geographic locations, social circles, and a large proportion of searching records. The high level of personalization has led the audiences to face "information silos" constructed by machines, consuming similar content and similar point of view over and over. For example, "#French Way of Dressing" is a popular tag with 99.2M views on RED. Adding this tag below any post can attract massive traffic. I searched this tag on this app and spent 2 minutes browsing several related posts - beautiful girls wearing retro clothes, delicate makeup, and curly hair fluttering in the beautiful scenery. When I returned to the main page of recommendations, I spent two minutes scrolling down in the next second. Among the 64 posts I swiped, 13 posts appeared to be related. After several searches, clicks, and like interactions, I have created a hyperrealistic world that I would surely enjoy and most likely be addicted to. Gradually the customized but isolated hyperreality had become a portal for me to escape from the chaos of reality.

Hyperreality is a beautiful illusion that is destructive to my real life. It takes me out of my natural flow and makes me an anxious addict and shopaholic. Compared with the beautiful simulation, the chaotic and ugly side of reality and natural life is amplified, creating the distorted desire for the hyperreal and extended dissatisfaction with the real. As it is more attractive and beautiful than my monotonous daily life, I chose the simulation as my prior experience and let it take over my leisure time and interfere with my understanding of the real world.

I also consumed tons of products that I didn't need. The advertisements on this platform are deeply embedded in this hyperreality. Advertising has been selling the concept of "you are what you possess" from history - Purchasing this product and getting the same identity shown in this commercial; having the same car, you are the elite in the car advertising. On this platform, advertisements are seamlessly integrated into people's daily sharing, making it much harder for the audience to distinguish them. Viewing the products in those daily vlogs could easily make people believe that they are the key to an enjoyable life, and they could also bring the same value to their lives. However, the advertisements are not indistinguishable. Once upon a time, the exact product would show up in several different influential publishers' vlogs at the same time. That was the key moment I realized that I fell into the beautiful hyperreality and consumerism trap.

This dilemma of living in a simulated hyperreality does not only exist in the RED app. Popular and influential social media apps are intentionally designed to be attractive and addictive. The trend of virtual reality and metaverse speeds up the transfer to hyperreality. Unconsciously, we might be accustomed to accepting and manipulating "simulated" information and living in a perceptual world that significantly exceeds our feelings, resulting in the disappearance of the real and the domination of hyperreality. It seems scarier than accepting the roughness of reality. I decided to quit the app, delete the portals to hyperreality, and spend those hours on offline life. It may not be as beautiful, but it's original and thoughtful and does not exist in other people's hyperreality.

References
Ryszard W. Wolny, Hyperreality and Simulacrum: Jean Baudrillard and European Postmodernism, https://revistia.org/files/articles/ejis_v3_i3_17/Ryszard.pdf
Russell W. Belk, Possessions and the Extended Self, JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH. Vol. 15. September 1988
“Hyperreality.” Wikiwand, https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hyperreality