Just as those who were born at the dawn of the fifteenth century were the first to be able, thanks to paper and the publishing industry, to read illustrated books, so those of us who were born in the middle of the last century will be studied in the future as the generation that grew up and developed under the influence of satellite television.

What was truly revolutionary, what had never before been seen in the history of telecommunications, was the joining of sounds and voices with images across great distances and in real time.

Our World was the first live international satellite television production, transmitted on June 25, 1967. Performers and artists from 14 countries participated, including The Beatles, opera singer Maria Callas and painter Pablo Picasso.

Late nineteenth century cinematography valued the physical expressiveness of actors who acted like mimes. Dialogue consisted of texts inserted between the sequences with great delay, and music, if there was any, was provided by a pianist. It was not until projection of The Jazz Singer in New York in 1927 that large audiences were able to see, for the first time, a commercial feature film with synchronized sound. This is not a minor detail, considering that Orson Welles’ radio drama, broadcast in 1938, led all of its listeners to believe that the world really was being invaded by extraterrestrials. It was the dramatized script of War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.

We are above all, and by nature, audiovisual beings. Audiovisual media produce in the spectator the lived sensory experience of being existentially and physically dislocated, in the antipodes, in the future or in the past. Hyperrealism is no longer just a school of painting; it has become a philosophical term, and we refer to the conviction that one is living in a real world, which is actually completely fake, as hyper-reality.

Somewhere in the world, under the “Big Cloud” that overshadows us at times, a map is being drawn, one computer key at a time, of our emotions, desires and sexual preferences, traveling indifferently via optic fiber, satellite waves or our own bioelectromagnetic circuits with which the map interacts. Our circuits are being studied and ultimately capitalized upon, through the meticulous management of information applications in collusion with statistical science and neuroeconomics. We may try to resist, but we remain devout subjects of this “Big Brother” called A.I. who governs our two hemispheres: the celestial and the cerebral, one fictitious and the other real.