You Are What You're Looking At

The website of a leading PhD program in media, culture, and communication from a prestigious university in New York contains not a single depiction of people in conversation. Instead, there's images of a smartphone raising through a crowd and a field of TV screens carpeting the floor. A third image at the top contains a more menacing artifact, a surveillance camera hanging off opposing concrete walls. It's an interesting choice of images that hints at humankind's century-long transition towards electronic communications. It would seem like human communication had changed, from something that happens among people to something that happens among technological artifacts.

Next to the surveillance camera there's graffiti on the wall. It reads — "What are you looking at?" — in bold stenciled letters. The question is a form of reflection, an invitation to think about the act of observation and its significance... Why does it matter what you look at? It's as simple as understanding that you can only observe one thing: Wherever you look, 'what' you see is the phenomenon called Reality. It's truly the only thing, because everything exists in it. Anywhere and anything you can look at, you are looking at Reality. It encompasses everything that happens, including you and your dreams.