I strongly recommend picking up a physical copy of The Complete Stories of JG Ballard [0]. Great to read through from time to time. Every story is weird and a little depressing, though, so don't read too many at once.
I always recommend his short story "Report On An Unidentified Space Station":
Ballard, like William Gibson, is one of those people that despite having zero technical know how, seems to intuitively understand how people interface with technology.
Crash is often seen as completely outlandish, but it's hard to see echoes of Robert Vaughan in today's culture. We watch A24's Civil War the same way that Vaughan and Ballard would watch a car crash.
Fellow British dystopian futurist John Brunner sort of did this in Stand on Zanzibar. Though now that I re-read it, it almost seems like VR, or rather the proxy-interactivity of VR, crossed with the filter bubble of social media:
MR. & MRS. EVERYWHERE: CALYPSO
"Like the good Lord God in the Valley of Bones
Engrelay Satelserv made some people called Jones.
They were not alive and they were not dead -
They were ee-magi-nary but always ahead.
What was remarkably and uniquely new -
A gadget on the set made them look like you!
"Watching their sets in a kind of a trance
Were people in Mexico, people in France.
They don't chase Jones but the dreams are the same
Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, that's the right name!
Herr und Frau Uberall or les Partout,
A gadget on the set makes them look like you.
"You can't see all the places of interest,
Go to the Moon and climb Mount Everest,
So you stay at home in a comfortable chair
And rely on Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere!
Doing all the various things you would like to do,
A gadget on the set makes them look like you.
"Wearing parkas and boots made by Gondola
You see them on an expedition polar.
They're sunning on the beach at Martinique
Using lotion from Guinevere Steel's Beautique.
Whether you're red, white, black or blue
A gadget on the set makes them look like you!
"When the Everywhere couple crack a joke
It's laughed at by all right-thinking folk.
When the Everywhere couple adopt a pose
It's the with-it view as everyone knows.
It may be a rumour or it may be true
But a gadget on the set has it said by you!
"English Language Relay Satellite Service
Didn't do this without any purpose.
They know very well what they would like -
A thousand million people all thinking alike.
When someone says something you don't ask who -
A gadget on the set has it said by you!
"'What do you think about Yatakang?'
'I think the same as the Everywhere gang.'
'What do you think of Beninia then?'
'The Everywheres will tell me but I don't know when.'
Whatever my country and whatever my name
A gadget on the set makes me think the same.">Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We’ll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes.
Tangentially related but I've watched the film La Terra Trema (1948) recently. It was made post WW2, shot in one of the poorest region of Italy. The most interesting thing about the film that 1, everything was shot on location 2, all characters were played by locals, all amateur actors 3, we don't know which scenes are staged or real (documentary).
And everything works. I never felt that I was watching amateur actors. Yes it's an old film but still more fresh than anything you see nowadays. And made me think that is it even possible to shoot a film like that today? We are all "poisoned" by TV, internet, social media, even radio. Would we able to act naturally at all? Probably impossible to do a film like that in Europe anymore and pretty much in all developed countries too. Maybe if it were in Africa or in some remote village in SEA.
In searching for the primary sources for the quotes in this article I found that "Extreme Metaphors" (ISBN 978-0-00-745485-3) seems to be the best collection of J. G. Ballard interviews.
Quite a few are collected here:
https://www.jgballard.ca/media/interviews.html
One of the interviews referenced in the OP can be found here:
https://www.jgballard.ca/media/1987_november_i-d_magazine.ht...
Here's a totally random piece of trivia: "social media" as a term was coined by the then wife of Seth Goldstein -- who founded a few different companies, Turntable.fm being the most notable -- and was originally the basis of a company he founded that was basically an ad network inside of games and apps built inside of the Facebook platform.
Seth is an interesting dude and I haven't caught up with him in awhile.
>“I think this reflects a tremendous hunger among people for ‘reality’—for ordinary reality. It’s very difficult to find the ‘real,’ because the environment is totally manufactured.”
I'd say just "reality", not necessarily "ordinary". Other than that, I agree with Ballard's sentiment. We're starved for genuineness, and instead we're compulsively throwing ourselves into hyperstimuli-ridden mockeries of essential needs: sex, friendship, love, food, stories, competition, playtime, spirituality, exploration. It's honestly baffling. And going only for their genuine counterparts is such an incredibly lonely experience, given the state of the world that we live in nowadays, that you'd need incredible willpower to withstand it.
The power of narrative made personal. If we aren't plucked chickens we are storytellers. The venue and media have changed, from oral tradition around a fire to photons sliding down fibers and fingers dancing on keyboards.
Narrative is a powerful and primitive force for humans, how we've always sought to impose structure and sense on events, from history to religion, to the mundane everyday and the trip abroad. Our brains crave narrative and invent it in a vacuum or as the interstitial bond between disconnected random events.
We can now own our public narrative and mythologize a heroic and extraordinary existence divorced from banal reality of paying bills and waiting in queues and going to the washroom and changing lightbulbs. Only the highlight reel makes it to prime time.
Social media are campaigns to seize control of narrative, to bring structure and synthetize relationships, to make sense of the world.
Predates print and electronic media, predates recorded history, a paradigm shift through Mcluhan's lens (always preferred his precursor, Innis).
Fascinating on a meta level, this comment being an example of its own thesis.
I wrote a similar piece on an earlier artist who I thought was similarly prescient, Nam June Paik
https://zwischenzugs.com/2020/01/04/the-astonishing-prescien...
Every day Ballard gets more right. I suggest you seek out interviews with him on Youtube, there are several there.
The text presented only talks about watching oneself, it doesn't mention watching each other's recording. So it does capture some of the self-centeredness, but it's not describing social media.
I _believe_ it was in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash where a pair of 7 year old brother-sister twins used complimentary and contradictory postings -- sometimes assuming eachother's identities or creating new ones -- in newsgroups to influence public opinion. When disinfo on Facebook and Twitter went nuclear in 2015 -2016 those fictional siblings were first to mind
And, of course, yesterday's Met Gala had as its theme Ballard's story "The Garden of Time". Timely.
French director Tati's film "Mon Oncle" certainly made satire of the obsession with modernity that post WWII France was experiencing.
I love this quote:
Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We’ll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes.
Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role.
Jerry Seinfeld once did an episode of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" where he showed the edited version of the day he spent with Bob Enstein and the unedited version. It was incredible to me how mundane and boring the unedited version was compared to the brilliant edited version. That was the point Seinfeld was trying to make. We live in a world a world of make believe.