Whose Reality Is This?
The power of our suspended disbelief
Last week, we talked about the toy, mirror, and art stages of technology and how our perception of technology changes as the type and intensity of its use grows in our own lives and the culture around us. We looked at this through Paul Levinson’s 1977 article. You can catch up on that post here. Today’s article builds on that, so if you have not read it, take a moment and go check it out.
In Levinson’s article that we focused on last week while talking about the “mirror stage” of technology, Levinson cites Bertrand Russell as noting that the willing suspension of disbelief was the most important development of the twentieth century.
Those are some bold words. Whether or not literally true or not, what does suspension of disbelief have to do with innovation?
As it turns out, quite a lot.
The typical way suspension of disbelief is talked about is in the context of narratives: Novels, plays, stories, and movies.
If you have a few minutes, this clip is worth a watch.
For me, it’s one of the reasons the movie Inception is so fascinating. If you have time, take a look at this clip, focusing on the section from around 0:37 to about 2:10:
In this scene, the character Ariadne starts learning how to build dreams, noting:
I guess I thought that the dream space would be all about the visual, but it’s more about the feel of it. My question is what happens when you start messing with the physics of it?1
The feel of it. It’s not the substance (the visual, the concrete, the content) of the dream that’s important, but the feel of it. The technology. The medium.
To answer the question, Ariadne then starts literally bending the reality of the dream. And what happens? Initially nothing. At the risk of over-quoting movies here,
We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented. It's as simple as that.2
The change doesn’t immediately jar the “projections” too much, they just move along with their “lives.” It also doesn’t jar the audience of the film: Nolan has created a story about the story he is trying to tell: it's more about the feel of it. We, the audience, accept that in the world of this film, this is normal.
What Nolan has done here is give the characters in the film a metaphor for suspension of disbelief. The projections accept the reality of the dream that’s been created for them and fill the space. No one questions things, up until a point at least.
As Ariadne gets bolder and starts changing this “reality" more, the projections of Cobb’s subconscious begin to revolt. They attack the architect who is “foreign” to the world and is changing their reality. Ultimately, they kill Ariadne who then wakes up in “the real world". But the metaphor is established. We can accept discontinuities, or gaps, in our expectation of reality to a certain point, but eventually, we can’t stay with the narrative.
In our “real” lives, when we “revoke” our suspension of disbelief, it normally comes in the form of doubt. We notice something that doesn’t add up for the first time. This then leads us to wonder what other things we may have overlooked. “It was there the whole time; how did I not see it?” All it takes is a little seed of doubt going too deep to trigger the collapse of our vision of how the world works. Disbelief takes hold. The projections kill the architect.
Levinson pulls this notion into our thoughts about media to make a few key points.
The public’s willingness to respond to an electronic transcription of a voice as if it were a live voice, and to a photochemical likeness of a face as if it were a real place, soon enabled communications technology to effectively recapture or substitute for the real world on a massive scale.3
During the time of wide adoption of a particular technology or media, we become unwillingly blind to its effects on us.
We respond to a photograph of a person with the same emotions as if it were the person. We get wrapped up in a phone conversation or a video call as if we were present with others. And this is by design. If we were painfully aware of the shortcomings of our technology all the time, we would never use it. So eventually, as the technology becomes normal enough, its eccentricities fade into the background.
But this of course leads to the next point: beyond the individual experience, Levinson observes that there is a population threshold at play here as well.
Enough people have to participate in this suspension of disbelief together for the technology to become really viable.
Unlike the perception of novelties, which is inherently subjective and individualized, reality perception is a fundamentally objective, group process – tested in the social consensus… and as such is strengthened and even predicated upon mass experience.4
We experience a “reality” together, it reinforces that what we are experiencing is “normal,” even when we are participating in a shared reality that is a little strange. We may individually disagree about what the experience means or was caused by, but seeing something with others makes it feel more objective. “You saw that too, right?”
We aren’t phased by how confrontational we can be in some media environments.
We begin to accept as normal our scattered attention.
We don’t question how much private information we willingly give away.
So like in Inception, once we become accustomed to our media environment, we become blind to it. It’s the reality we are presented with. It is most obvious when a media is new or a media begins changing the rules on us. We start paying attention to the architect who is pulling the strings and making our reality change shape.
The important thing for us to realize is, regardless of whether we notice it or not, our media environment is always a construction.
The moments we share online, the viral posts, the reviews we read on Google Maps are all products of the choices humans have made. We are all participating in building our reality all the time.
So then, where does this leave us?
Suspension of Disbelief is a powerful tool. It’s what allows us to enjoy stories, despite there being some gaps. It’s what allows us to feel connected to other humans even if we can only hear each other over the telephone. But we should always be vigilant to the architect behind the scenes, pulling the strings.
And with that, see you next week.
Notes and Further Watching
For the second week in a row, thanks to Diana Holder for contributing to this post! She pulled in the Inception analogy that ended up pulling the whole thing together, so cheers!
In researching this, I realized that the character Ariadne’s name is a reference to Greek Mythology. “She was mostly associated with mazes and labyrinths because of her involvement in the myths of the Minotaur and Theseus.”5 Of course it is, and I’m just noticing it 11 years later.
This was another Youtube video I found to be a good explainer on Suspension of Disbelief:
The Truman Show, 1998
Learning Cyberspace, 80
Learning Cyberspace, 81