📺 Perpetuating Digital Landscapes - The Dissolution of Information Through the Framing of Digital Landscapes in Late 90s Media

This was quite a short essay that I wrote for another class I had early on in my research masters. Took the opportunity to write about Serial Experiments Lain. There are some interesting connections to theory here, but ultimately this essay is very underdeveloped and one I will return to in future.

Perpetuating Digital Landscapes | The Dissolution of Information Through the Framing of Digital Landscapes in Late 90’s Media

In the wake of the commercialisation of the internet in 1995, an influx of 90’s media predicting and portraying the upcoming digital age ruptured in response, spawning a cult following and an associated aesthetic to this emergent digital era. Serial Experiments Lain (1998) is a Japanese animated series which explores the cultural context of this early digital age, and within its narrative, critiques the newly forming digital landscape surrounding the internet by portraying its own. By creating ‘The Wired’, a virtual landscape which mirrors late 90’s and early 2000s internet landscape, Serial Experiments Lain provides commentary on our consumption of information, portrayal of digital landscapes, and the rapidly expanding ideas of reality, identity and space within the cultural context of the time. In portraying the potential developments of a digital landscape, and informations role in such developments, Serial Experiments Lain contributes towards the development of a certain visual and functional aesthetic of the developing internet alongside much science fiction media at the time, such as other Japanese works like Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Western cinema such as The Matrix (1999).

These texts participate in the shaping of a general collective vision of the digital landscape of internet culture, and in their critiques and predictions of this new digital landscape - influence how people imagine, develop and interact with digital spaces. These pieces of media act as a blueprint for the development of digital landscapes, and arguably lead to the transformation of online spaces and our identities within them. By imagining a digital landscape in this way, these texts provide critique but also create cultural influence in the development of such spaces, and how we expect to interact with information through them. By generating such ideas, these digital landscapes enable the fragmented dissolution of information, and the control of information by external forces by proxy. By normalizing these ideas, such examples of media both expose but also inhibit these developments within digital spaces. Through analyzing Serial Experiments Lain, through the lens’ of Jean Baudrillard and W.J.T. Mitchell, I aim to explore the ideas surrounding information, and the digital landscape which it proposes. By doing this, it is my intention to examine the perpetuated effects of proposing fictional digital landscapes, and whether these expose and critique the forming digital landscapes of the real, or contribute to the framing itself and therefore the implosion and dissolution of meaning in the digital processing of information.

My theoretical framework in approaching this will be considering the work of Baudrillard, and his ideas surrounding the loss of meaning through implosion of information. Baudrillard argues that ‘either information produces meaning…has nothing to do with signification…[or] is directly destructive of meaning and signification’ (99-100). Serial Experiments Lain provides commentary on all three of these hypotheses through the blurred lines it draws between the in-text reality, and the virtual space of The Wired. The Wired within Serial Experiments Lain, is a developing virtual reality space which users can project themselves into. This space allows communication, transfer of information, and access to media - mirroring the real world internet. However, throughout the series, the validity of information in The Wired is brought into question as information processed through it begins to contradict reality - such as when people begin receiving emails via The Wired from a girl who had in reality passed away a week beforehand. This dissonance between people’s intentions, and their actions in The Wired, is a recurring theme explored through the protagonist Lain Iwakura, whose identity comes into question as she is repeatedly found having done things in The Wired which her real self doesn’t recall. These recurring instances highlight the destruction of meaning through the digital landscape, as intentions and realities are ignored in favor of the resulting signification of action in The Wired.

The space in which The Wired occupies, can be considered a framed digital landscape which both mirrors and blurs the in-text reality. W.J.T. Mitchell’s theses on landscape can be applied to analyzing the virtual space of The Wired, such as his consideration of landscape as ‘not a genre’, but a ‘social hieroglyph…[and] medium of exchange’ (5). Considering The Wired as a digital medium of exchange, allows us to consider it as both a processor and distributor of information as well as a tool used between human characters to communicate within the narrative. Mitchell also importantly relates landscape to ‘imperialism’, another aspect which relates to The Wired, which is revealed to be closely surveillanced and controlled by external agents (5). Through this lens, The Wired can be considered both a setting and a mechanism within the narrative which frames information in ways that mirror yet obscure reality, while being a controlled space of dominance which reconfigures individual autonomy within itself. Considering these theses surrounding information and landscape, The Wired allows a textual analysis which is revealing both of the exponential transgressions of digital information exchange, and the implicit and problematic framing of the internet as a digital landscape.

Throughout Serial Experiments Lain, The Wired develops from a simple communication network, to an entirely convincing alternate reality which bleeds into actual reality. This is gradually revealed from our introduction to The Wired through the protagonist Lain, who after hearing about the emails being received from dead student Chisa Yomada, seeks her father’s help in getting set up on The Wired. Lain’s father appears already consumed by the digital culture of the in-text world - his room lined with monitors, barely giving his daughter attention as she enters. When asked about upgrading her Navi, Lain’s father encourages Lain;

‘You should upgrade that old Navi, you know Lain, in the real world, or the wired

world, people are connected somehow. That’s how societies are created. You should

broaden your horizons, make an effort to create friends…you can live and communicate in both worlds, there’s nothing to be afraid of’ (Serial Experiments Lain, Episode 01).

Already here from the show’s pilot episode, we are introduced to the idea of the ‘real world’ and ‘wired world’ which are entirely separate yet intertwined (SEL, Episode 01). Real world meaning is blurred and misconstrued, made immediately apparent through the death yet remaining online presence of Chisa Yomada. This is highlighted further in episode three, when the version of Chisa in The Wired declares that ‘in the real world, it didn’t matter if I was there or not’, referring to the still existent version of herself in The Wired (SEL, Episode 03).

This exponential dissolution between the real and wired worlds is continually developed throughout the series, The Wired eventually become a sort of ‘hyperreality’ similarly described by Baudrillard (101). This hyperreality explored by Baudrillard examines the idea of simulation of reality becoming ‘more real than the real’, a phenomenon where ‘simulacra’ develops from a replication of reality, to an idealized version, eventually becoming completely severed - making the distinction between real and not, meaningless (101). This is highlighted through the character of Lain, who gradually loses sense of self throughout the series. As Lain explores the augmented virtual reality of The Wired, her virtual projections of herself gradually become independent entities within The Wired. The version of Lain within The Wired is more bold and charismatic, but later becomes entirely detached and an antagonist of Lain herself. In this way, the simulated projection of Lain within The Wired, has become the severed simulacra of the hyperreality that is The Wired. Like with Chisa Yomada, the digital reflections of the real become increasingly separate from the real within The Wired, and meaning between the two worlds is lost.

This dissolution of information however is revealed to be due to the manipulation of external agents asserting control over The Wired, highlighting The Wired not as a neutral space, but as a constructed and controlled one. Similar to Baudrillard, Mitchell describes the dissonance between ‘a real place and its simulacrum’ in reference to landscape, but also describes it not as ‘a matter of internal politics…but also an international, global phenomenon, intimately bound up with the discourses of imperialism’ (Mitchell 5-9). He describes imperialism as ‘a complicated process of exchange, mutual transformation, and ambivalence (Mitchell 9). The Wired can be viewed under the same considerations, revealed to be developed by the fictional company; Tachibana General Laboratories, who in developing the technology Protocol 7, allowed the uploading of the human mind into The Wired with aims of turning The Wired into a global hyperreality of collective consciousness. This reveals The Wired as a digital landscape subject to external architectures of control, creating illusions of free will for its users, while being manipulated unknowingly. Lain acts as a core example of this, her loss of self being unknowingly enabled by this external company, with both her identity and reality being lost come the end of the series.

The Wired, mirroring the real world developing internet, displays itself as a digital landscape of communication and information processing. While exciting and engaging for its users, the prolonged alienation and existentialism it provokes is not immediately apparent. In this way, the digital landscape of The Wired falls under the same problematic scrutiny which Mitchell highlights of landscape - that ‘perception is “invented”’, and the aesthetics surrounding these perspectives are ‘never brought into questioning’ (8). Despite events within The Wired causing mass confusion amongst its users throughout the series, the usage of The Wired is assumed as normal and never questioned, and as our introduction to The Wired is through Lain’s, we are never privy to the early developments or perceptions of the technology, it simply exists within the text’s continuity. Like Baudrillard’s described hyperreality, The Wired exists without origin or historical context, and as an assumed truth which the simulacra of its contents obscure. Baudrillard highlights as much when referring to the ‘force of myth’ attached to the social and communicative relationship to hyperreality, and the ‘belief and the faith in information…[that] give the system itself…an unlocatable reality’ (101-102). The closest correlation the audience has to understanding The Wired’s context within the text, is its comparisons drawn to the developing real internet of the time. In displaying The Wired in this way, and providing visual aesthetic to the augmented virtual reality it projects, Serial Experiments Lain projects The Wired as a simulacra of the real internet, creating idealizations of functions and developments in relation to the development of digital landscapes within the real world.

In doing this, a closed circuit of information is created in itself - opening to question the developments and consequences of the creation of digital communication and information landscapes, while creating a simulacra in itself which assumes our own perception of digital landscapes and as such, contributes to our collective belief in such information systems as pre-existing structures. Much of the cultural developments of The Wired shown in Serial Experiments Lain, can be seen rupturing in early 2000s internet culture - social media, the use of online digital personas, online anonymity and viral information, leading to questioning the predictability of such developments or the assumed enabling of their developments through their preconception in media. What is present here once again is the dissolution between these effects in the real world, and their simulation and framed portrayal in digital spaces through media. Through the communication of these ideas, their origins and assumed perspectives are blurred and lost within the digital landscape itself, the dialogue and critiques becoming lost in the echo chamber of communication which in itself is going unquestioned through its user’s trust and usage. This now more than ever is highlighted through the idealized aesthetic of this rupture of internet-predicting 90’s media present in current online digital landscapes. Serial Experiments Lain, now a popular aesthetic with a newfound modern cult following, starkly mocks the perpetuated digital landscape it exists within. Self-realized in its critique of developing digital landscapes, it highlights the general loss of meaning through the phenomenon of digital media, and the self-propagating cycles of digital landscape perpetuation in which it participates. Through the normalization of digital landscapes, Serial Experiments Lain and other adjacent 90’s media highlight an interesting point of rupture in the imagining of internet culture, and reveal the problematic exchange of information and ideas within its framing.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. "The implosion of meaning in the media." in In the Shadow of the Silent

Majorities. Los Angeles, 2007, pp. 99-108.

Mitchell, William John Thomas, “Imperial Landscape”, in Landscape and power. University of

Chicago Press, 2002, pp. 5-34.

Serial Experiments Lain, Directed by Ryutaro Nakamura, Triangle Staff, 1998.

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