JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorists whose work is most closely tied with post-structuralism and early post modernism, through which the idea of hyperreality has been shaped.
Baudrillard’s early semiotic study found that today’s consumer society exists as a large network of signs and symbols that need to be decoded. It is form this that he formed the basis for the work, Simulacra and Simulation, which furthered this idea that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is a simulation of reality. Here, Baudrillard recounts a story by Jorges Luis Borges that tells of imperial mapmakers who makes a map so large and detailed that it covers the whole empire, existing in a one-to-one relationship with the territory underlying it. It is a perfect replica of the empire, and so the citizens of the empire now take the map, or the simulacrum of the empire, for the real empire. The map eventually begins to fray and tatter, but the real territory under the map has turned to desert and all that is left is the frayed map as a simulacrum of reality.
In our culture, Baudrillard argues that we take ‘maps’ of reality television and film as more real than our actual lives. These simulacra or hyperreal copies precede our lives, such that our television friends may seem more ‘alive’ to us than the real person playing that character. He also began studying how media affected our perception of reality and the world. Here he found that in a post-modern media-laden society we encounter “the death of the real”, where one lives in a hyperreal realm by connecting more and more deeply with things like television sitcoms, music videos, virtual reality games or Disneyland, things that have come to simulate reality. He argues that in a post-modern culture dominated by TV, films, the Internet and media all that exists are simulations of reality, which aren’t any more or less ‘real’ than the reality they simulate.
As such, Baudrillard points to the process of simulation in which representations of things come to replace the things being represented, and that the representations become more important than the ‘real thing’. The massed collection of these simulations has resulted in the condition of hyperreality, where we only experience prepared realities such as edited war footage or reality TV and the distinction between the ‘real’ and simulations has collapsed.
Baudrillard’s early semiotic study found that today’s consumer society exists as a large network of signs and symbols that need to be decoded. It is form this that he formed the basis for the work, Simulacra and Simulation, which furthered this idea that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is a simulation of reality. Here, Baudrillard recounts a story by Jorges Luis Borges that tells of imperial mapmakers who makes a map so large and detailed that it covers the whole empire, existing in a one-to-one relationship with the territory underlying it. It is a perfect replica of the empire, and so the citizens of the empire now take the map, or the simulacrum of the empire, for the real empire. The map eventually begins to fray and tatter, but the real territory under the map has turned to desert and all that is left is the frayed map as a simulacrum of reality.
In our culture, Baudrillard argues that we take ‘maps’ of reality television and film as more real than our actual lives. These simulacra or hyperreal copies precede our lives, such that our television friends may seem more ‘alive’ to us than the real person playing that character. He also began studying how media affected our perception of reality and the world. Here he found that in a post-modern media-laden society we encounter “the death of the real”, where one lives in a hyperreal realm by connecting more and more deeply with things like television sitcoms, music videos, virtual reality games or Disneyland, things that have come to simulate reality. He argues that in a post-modern culture dominated by TV, films, the Internet and media all that exists are simulations of reality, which aren’t any more or less ‘real’ than the reality they simulate.
As such, Baudrillard points to the process of simulation in which representations of things come to replace the things being represented, and that the representations become more important than the ‘real thing’. The massed collection of these simulations has resulted in the condition of hyperreality, where we only experience prepared realities such as edited war footage or reality TV and the distinction between the ‘real’ and simulations has collapsed.