Quotes from Scott Bukatman

In an early article Jean Baudrillard wrote: "It is useless to fantasize about state projection of police control through TV. . . . TV, by virtue of its mere presence, is a social control in itself. There is no need to imagine it as a state periscope spying on everybody's life– the situation as it stands is more efficient than that: it is the certainty that people are no longer speaking to each other.

Whether "cyberspace" is a real place or not, our experience of electronic space is a "real" experience. By distinguishing the constitution of being as an activity of interface, phenomenology suggests that the status of being is not an absolute condition, but one that changes relative to changes in the experience of the real.

The desire to become a cyborg connects to the new "eternal cycle" of consumerism and product circulation; one character predicts that, "In the future, shopping will become a major form of entertainment". Obviously, this future is now, as afternoons at the mall and The Price Is Right and The Home Shopping Network make abundantly clear.