The answer is no where. There is no line between truth and fiction.
With the power of technology, language, and anonymity, rumors and lies now hold a powerful place in everyone's daily lives. How can one tell if an article holds the whole truth? If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many of those words are untrue? Take for example, the story of Zilla van den Born. This Buzzfeed article tells her story of how she was able to trick all her friends and family that she was on a vacation in East Asia for six weeks just with the power of Photoshop. Describing this experiment as "the ultimate fakecation", the article reveals the pictures she used to pretend as if she was interacting with the people and the activities of East Asia.
However, even an articles that "reveals the truth" can hold its own white lies. Another article contradicts the Buzzfeed article by actually mentioning the motive of van den Born. She did not do it as just a joke to fool her friends and family, but instead to prove "how easily reality gets distorted". It isn't difficult to find the irony in this situation.
In Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried, O'Brien utilizes the power of verisimilitude. After chapters followed by chapters of intense passion and exhaustive imagery and detail, he suddenly reveals that his book is not a memoir. Later, I learned that the book isn't just interlaced with fiction; it was 90% fiction. He even applied metafiction (basically the fancy word for fiction-ception), which, personally, made me put the book down to rethink my priorities. But why did TTTC's reveal of the untruth of his novel boggle the reader so much? What makes the novel any more convincing than any other realistic-fiction story?
O'Brien's trick was to utilize the overlap between fiction and truth. He looked for elements that could exist at both ends in the spectrum, and the big factor was emotion.
The world has many barriers: mountains, the ocean, language, culture, to list a few. However, emotion is universal. Sadness from a young American girl will cause the same ache as the sadness from an old Tibetan monk. Fiction contains the events of imagination but the emotions of truth. O'Brien took advantage of this knowledge and extracted empathy from the reader, something that readers do not usually encounter in regular works of fiction.
So, knowing that fiction can easily cross over to reality, can reality cross over to fiction? The scary conclusion is that reality and truth are based off perspective. What one perceives to be truth may be different from what another perceives it as. In this situation, parts of one's everyday life is a lie.
It's hard not to over-think life after realizing that our every day lives are paradoxes. What more do I not know about my existence? If I can't control my own truth, does that mean I can't also control my own fate? Are we simply the virtual simulations of human life in a more powerful force's game of Sims 24?
As of now, thinking too hard will do no good. As long as one perceives themselves as truthful, he/she will be able to live in the bliss of fiction.
Man, that was deep. I loved how you made fiction and truth interchangeable, and the pool pictures really helped, too. But now my brain hurts....
ReplyDeleteYour example with the fakecation and Photoshop was very effective and relevant to your claim. I also like your use of rhetorical questions throughout the piece.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you should consider the use of more puns in your next post.
HEHE
I remember reading the same buzzfeed article on Van den Born but this made me think about it in a different perspective. I chuckled at your first picture.
ReplyDeleteHAHAHA sims 24! I wish... Dead on, reality and fiction are unidentifiable in our eyes since they can be so similar. Even though there is definitely a reality, humans sometimes never find it, since we are things that lie and believe too easily. We think that we are living in reality, well don't the people in fictional worlds believe they do too? Maybe we also live in a fictional world, "History is written by the victors"- Winston Churchill. Our society is built on our history, and who said the victors can't lie? In the end everything we live for might be a lie.
ReplyDeleteAhahahahaha I've read that buzzfeed article before and I've also seen the pool picture before so I was really glad to see things that I recognized. You're so right with the whole reality vs fiction piece. It's just like how people post pictures of themselves having fun on social networks to portray to people how much "fun" they're having when really they just want to make themselves feel popular and cool. This has the opposite effect on the receiving end. The people who see these pictures reflect on their own lives and think well my life sucks.. So yes, you're absolutely right. Basically our lives are a lie.
ReplyDeleteThis article was super interesting. Also, I would never be able to have the attention span to analyze verisimilitude the way you did. I thought it was really interesting how you transitioned form a concrete example of trickery to verisimilitude.I thought it was really cool that you tied a literal form of verisimilitude with a universal theme in The Things They Carried.
ReplyDeleteThis article was really good. I really liked the way that you showed the power of verisimilitude in modern life, and how it applies to all of us. Also, I really liked your example with the fakecation--it was really funny to read and interesting how you connected that to the books we read over the summer.
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