When we hear the word “appearance”, normally the first association that comes to our minds is personal appearance. How do I look today? Are my clothes neat and clean and fashionable? Is my hair neatly combed and styled? Do my teeth look clean and white? Personal appearance has to do with the surface of who we are. It has nothing to do with our mind or soul or spirit or character or interior or our personality or our skills. Of course, it’s nice to have a nice personal appearance. People tend to feel that if a particular person is well put together, that relates to something positive in the person. But sometimes, an unkempt appearance relates to either lack of money for nice clothes and good personal care for hair and teeth or lack of interest in personal care as a result of depression. It could also relate to a person adopting a more bohemian life style.
We also tend to talk about the appearance of things, and frequently if a person wants to sell or buy them. A house, a car, a musical instrument, a work of art. There is a belief that if a thing has a good appearance, it certainly has a very good chance of being in good physical condition. Actually, with a thing, we are concerned with how it seems in a particular moment and how it seems over time. So, we are also concerned with how a thing lasts over time.
Finally, there is the appearance of a situation. Is a situation stimulating in a positive way? Is it constructive for us? Is it comfortable, or chaotic, or uncomfortable, or even dangerous? One wants to be able to read the surface of a situation in order to know how to proceed. One intuits certain facts or ideas from one’s perception of the surface of a situation. The intuition from the surface of a situation helps to connect a person with what is going on within the situation. When wisely gathered and used, the intuition helps the person to penetrate more deeply within the situation, gives the person a greater sense of mastery or control over it.
But all this assumes that there is a depth underneath the surface or the appearance of a situation. In screen reality – the reality of movies, television, video games, computers, tablets and smartphones – there isn’t. Even in movies and television, where there are portrayals of three-dimensional scenes, we, the audience, experience these scenes on one level as compressed two-dimensional scenes. In other words, in these situations, the surface is practically everything for us. And yet, the people of modern technological society spend so much time in front of machines that give us two-dimensional experience. This is a qualitatively different kind of experience, pattern of experience, than people in more traditional natural societies ever had the opportunity to have access to. And this change in kind and pattern of experience has profoundly affected the way the minds of modern people work.
For one thing, it creates difficulty for us to even conceptualize the depth that lies underneath the appearance of people, places, things and situations. The surface becomes the total reality. The emphasis of appearance in screen reality gets transferred to external world reality. And this leads to shallow-grounding in one’s external world living environment. Today, people move more often than in the past and place much less value in real roots. They move a lot geographically, they also move around a lot in relationships and in jobs. Bonding with others becomes more shallow. There are a lot more divorces, people quitting their jobs, families fragmenting, people leaving their communities. In today’s world, people become numb to the depth in themselves and in others.
And because people live on the surface of life today, they have much less use for symbols. In traditional natural societies, symbols were surface entities that helped people to intuitively grasp complex traits and situations that existed below the surface and within the mysterious depths. Because there very simply are some phenomena below the surface of things that are too complex and/or too nebulous to easily understand. Either too full of defined discrete stimuli or too full of flowing blendable continual stimuli. Or both.
But symbols are important means of connecting people to their living environments, to other people and to themselves. With regard to symbols, how many movies, television programs or even plays today lend themselves to a more profound symbolic analysis? Symbols make a work of art, in general, a more organic whole.
But screen reality seems to be the enemy of the use and cultivation of symbols. Its very structure seems to trivialize all the phenomena that it contains. And in its portrayal of humans in movies and television programs, it trivializes us and turns us into digital specks in the cosmos.