• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 22, 2008

What's in a pseudonym, or, Would an avatar by any other name smell as sweet?

When it comes to their depictions of the real world, the media have always walked a pretty fine line. Lately, it seems the virtual world may be winning out. It's a progression as old as canvas, vinyl, celluloid or magnetic tape, but the ephemeral and amorphous nature of digital media appears to be pushing the boundaries separating our actual world from our pseudo-societies.

If there was a single moment of media Zen that epitomized - indeed, virtually defined this shift - it took place on Jan. 18, 2007, when Bill O'Reilly, the brash, confrontational, right-wing star of the Fox News Channel, appeared on The Colbert Report, the Comedy Central faux news show that is a not so thinly veiled parody of O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor.

Near the end of some fairly surreal banter between O'Reilly and Colbert, the Fox News personality sought to assuage his brusque reputation. "I'm not a tough guy," O'Reilly insisted. "This is all an act."

"If you're an act," Colbert, retorted. "Then what am I?"

In theatrical terms, Colbert's quip effectively brought the fourth wall down on O'Reilly's "act," and in the process raised serious doubts about the substance of a major network news personality, and by extension, how much of the real world is depicted in the media. It was as surreal and revealing a media moment as Richard Nixon saying, "Sock it to me," on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, or Bill Clinton playing his saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show.

Even before digitization, media was, at best, a crude facsimile of real life. Cave paintings were rough approximations of early hunter and gatherer lifestyles. Drums, smoke signals, Morse code and other transmittable media technologies were mere representations of the messages and content they sought to deliver. But for all their limitations in bandwidth, analog media historically strived to record, preserve and convey the real world as best they could. It wasn't until the impressionistic, cubist, surreal and Dadaistic art movements began to bend the way media depicted reality that things really changed, influencing generations of writers, filmmakers and media content purveyors that followed. And, oh yeah, audiences, too.

In fact, you could argue that real life often is simply imitating media art in the pseudo-reality of modern media's virtual worlds. Concepts like cyberspace, virtual worlds and online digital societies were originally conceived in the literature of influential science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, who authored self-fulfilling futuristic storylines that ironically came to fruition as soon as the technology became feasible to render them.

Scott Sorokin, president of Carat, who is a fan and keen observer of science fiction, says, "I think we have always seen the prophetic influence of literature and pop culture on our society especially when it comes to the world of science fiction, which Isaac Asimov called, 'the only form of literature concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings, that consistently considers the nature of the challenges that face us, the possible consequences, and the possible solutions.' We credit William Gibson with online societies and virtual worlds today, but he was just insightful enough to look at the world around him and project where we might be someday."

Hundreds of millions of people now have digital personas posted on a host of online social networks where they relate to a potentially infinite number of friends, acquaintances and business contacts whom they may never physically meet. People are now introduced, date, and propose to their spouses online. While humans still need to procreate their organic selves in the real world, they propagate digital selves in virtual worlds. They also buy things, build things, own things and create brand affinities that often are as real, valuable and substantive as if they were conducting commerce in the physical world. Second Life's Linden dollars have a real-world exchange value (269.1 Linden$/1 u.s.$ at press time, according to Reuters' Second Life news bureau), and Asia's virtual merchandise developers are estimated to be a several-hundred-million-dollar-a-year cottage industry - and growing fast.

Real-world brands, meanwhile, have set up shop in virtual worlds. You can order custom-made athletic apparel in Adidas' store in Second Life, and if you prefer the physical kind, Adidas will even manufacturer and ship it to you, so long as you pay in legal, real world tender - or with a major credit card.

Sorokin gets worked up about the increasingly thin line separating the actual from the virtual and says, "The lines have been blurring for quite some time. And though all the predictions and prophecies haven't yet come true, we are seeing a blurring where life isn't just imitating art. But life is imitating art imitating life - like the metaphor of looking in the rearview mirror and seeing yourself looking in the rearview mirror seeing yourself.... Is it real or is it Memorex? And does it matter? When political candidates show up campaigning inside Second Life or basing entire national debates on YouTube and Facebook, we're no longer talking about simulated worlds or experiences anymore. We're talking about our world."

The blur between the physical and digital worlds is growing so acute, that some people now spend more time engaged in virtual activities than they do in any real-world ones - including sleep - raising all sorts of implications for society at large and media professionals in particular.

"In the broader spectrum of games, realism is something to be avoided," MediaPost's "Gaming Insider" columnist Joshua Lovison ob-served in a recent column advising marketers on how to deal with real-world brands in virtual environments - and, ironically, vice versa.

The placement of real brands in certain realistic video game genres such as racing, or sports-related games, works well, he said, because the relationships between the brands, the games and the players are "authentic." But place them in fantasy environments, and they may stick out like a sore thumb.

"I mean, there's nothing like smashing a zombie with a product to create an authentic brand experience, as you are able to in the game Dead Rising, one of the best sellers for the Xbox 360," wrote Lovison, adding that at the very least, such placements are likely to be "distracting" for the gamers - and the brands.

The alternative, he recommended, would be to create fantasy brands designed specifically for the virtual gaming worlds.

"It's high time some pioneering brands consider placement in these sorts of games," he advocated. "The key to success is integrating into the game universe, not invading it. Keep the essential branding elements, but apply them to a fictional product appropriate to the fictional world. The payoff will be worth it; gamers are a loyal bunch. If advertisers respect the gaming experience, it will forge some very positive brand associations."

It's not just virtual worlds that are blurring the lines. The growth in so-called "prosumer" media technologies are arming Average Joes with the same power to publish, produce and telecast that only major media companies, advertisers and agencies have traditionally had.

Given this backdrop, it's easy to understand Stephen Colbert's quip, and to also feel like we're all in on the act. We are. Comedy Central parent, Viacom, may not have kept the clip available in its archives for me to review for this story, but it wasn't hard for this author to find and access the clip posted on a blog page.

Digitalization may be accelerating the blur between the real and virtual worlds, but it is a trend as old as, well, the war of the worlds - literally. When Orson Welles broadcast his radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds on radio on Halloween night in 1938 it set off real-world panic, and made front page news. "Terror By Radio" blared The New York Times' head line the following morning.

In recent years, the line separating media fact and fiction has blurred even further. Major newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post both lost a substantial degree of credibility when they were discovered to have published major stories that were fabricated out of whole cloth. Venerable Timemagazine was caught altering a photo of O.J. Simpson to make him appear darker and more sinister at the height of his murder trial. The New York Times was reduced to sourcing The National Enquirer - a tabloid known for coverage of alien abductions and Elvis sightings - as an authoritative source on the O.J. case.

If this progression seems like we've fallen down a media rabbit hole, it's nothing compared to the way the media has come to depict actual "reality." What began as some bold and innovative experiments with cinéma verité on American public television - pioneering shows like An American Family or The Police Tapes - which followed real people around doing real things, has blossomed into a new genre of reality TV programming that often is anything but real. Fox's Cops begat MTV's The Real World begat CBS' Survivor begat Fox's The Simple Life begat VH1's Flavor of Love.

And that's nothing compared with how the media presents the original reality-TV genre: news. Television news coverage has progressed from Edward R. Murrow to Walter Cronkite to Dan Rather to Katie Couric. Local news coverage has gone from community news to "If it bleeds it leads," and most news media devote a disproportionate amount of coverage to the kind of celebrity snafus that would make an alien encountered by The National Enquirer wonder on what planet - or in what dimension - they had landed.

Mainstream news organizations, meanwhile, are under siege from a growing legion of citizen journalists and amateur pundits that have blurred the line between the Fifth Estate and the blogosphere. And as a venerable news publisher like The New York Times struggles to reinvent its print-publishing model to compete in the world of online media, it may be shocking to realize that The Drudge Report or DiggNation are now considered more reliable sources of news for a generation suckled online. Shocking too, is the fact that ads on thedrugereport.com now command a substantially higher CPM than ads on newyorktimes.com, as an analysis by MEDIA sister magazine OMMA discovered last month.

Meanwhile, all media brands - new and old alike - face a far greater risk to their relevance. The ability to instantaneously access, aggregate, sort and contextualize digital content is making the next generation of media consumers their own editors. The home pages of Google News and Yahoo Finance are now more personally relevant, and have far greater reach, than the front pages of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.

It's hard to imagine that such newspapers of record will ever lose all their relevance, but the progression of digital media technologies puts a premium on revisionism vs. posterity. The old adage used to be that journalism is the best first draft of history. In the age of Wikipedia, history becomes relative, and is revised by whomever is quickest to post.