The virtual and the disconnected: an analysis of our 21st century perceptive behaviors and their effects on communication and visual culture

How do we percieve the world?’ Through research and literary review, as well as reflection on personal experience and culture, I have come to develop temporary notions that will be tested and analyzed through further methodology and experimentation. I am supporting the notion that we live in a highly post-modernist society, living liquid lives and experiencing entirely interconnected relationships with our social and technological milieus. Hence the way we percieve the world is highly different to societies preceding our exponential development. First of all our immediate perception of our surroundings is altered by the changing visual environment of our lives in design, technology, and social developments. Secondly, our psychological perception of the rest of the world is strongly influenced by the nature of our current 21st century endeavors. We continue to develop a deep knowledge and understanding of our coexistence with images and technology. More and more, these entities are proving themselves to be omnipresent in our culture and are gravitating away from our complete control of them. The development of the notion of ‘others’ in our mind has evolved from previous societies, aided as well by the intricately wired and connected social network we have created for ourselves. This, as well as all aforementioned developments, has engendered a visibly strengthened and diverse individualism that contrasts with our flourishing homogenization. Conversation with the others and with the self has become a virtual construct. All these happenigs have occured due to the accelerated development of a technologically and socially fragmented, postmodernist environment. My intent is to ultimately represent visually the altered perceptive behaviors and undertandings of our current society in a visual composition that comprises all notions developped during the thesis.