“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.” ― Philip K. Dick

I read this quote and I knew I had to write something about it.

The concept of “manufacturing reality” scares me as a future media creator. I want to believe that I can tell the difference between what is news and what is make believe, but it seems that increasingly it is harder to trust my senses on this.

The quote above reminds me of the film Wag the Dog, which explores the idea of a filmmaker writing history by creating news of a war that does not exist, to protect a politician. Though it’s fiction, it’s quite scary to think that somebody could have so much power that they could literally create history. I think that after a certain point, it would be out of even the creator’s hands; if something is so ingrained in people’s minds and enough people believe it, it becomes real. It is the very same concept mentioned above of “creating universes of the mind”.

I hope that through my work I can create alternate universes that may help people escape from their lives for a while. But I also hope that people can always tell the difference between reality and imagination, and that the media is never so powerful that we completely lose trust in those feeding us information.