JEAN BAUDILLARD – SIMULACRA SIMULACRUM

In our modern world that science categorizes human beings and labels them normal or abnormal in an attempt to classify and understand them and that just in the relatively short period of recorded human history that we have access.

The stability was the game in town in the past and it was being called into question now the stability of things like words as we talked about through the work of Derrida.

This new world that we live in that’s dominated by media we understand our reality only in terms of how it compares to what’s playing out on the screens in our lives consider the fact that oftentimes our entire social experience is mediated by things that we’ve seen on the TV consider the fact that we live in a time where it’s not even weird to hear people talk about their lives in terms of how it compares to something on the TV to talk about.

On their TV screen even the deaths of thousands can be reduced to just signs and symbols this is an example of how the simulation that were in disconnects us from reality, this is a complex network of signs and symbols given to us by the media what it depicts is an imitation of real-world processes and events not reality itself, something that’s probably important to say here is that Baudrillard is not saying that you’re a bad person if you watch the news and like to stay informed on recent events. No!

On the contrary, there is nothing about your experience of the world in this postmodern media driven simulation that’s even relevant to reality anymore. I mean what is more relevant to your life within the simulation is it the full extent of the reality of what’s going on in the world or is it the simulated reality that the

media reports that not only lets you have conversations with people around

you about what’s going on but it also allows you to continue living your life seemingly well informed with a worldview that helps you understand things.

The example of the matrix what is more relevant to the lives of the people in that simulated world a story about a war going on between machines and humans at the level of reality or a story they can use to understand things within the matrix so that they can keep living their life here’s another example people use when they’re talking about.

Baudrillard imagine two people in some sort of online dating situation where they’ve only communicated thus far through instant messaging let’s call them John and Susie.

Now Susie after talking for a while asked John to send her a picture of himself so she can see who she’s talking to, but John is 50 years old and he knows that Susie is 25 years, old John is self-conscious about the fact that he’s so much older than her he really wants to keep talking to her so he sends her a picture of himself from back when he was 25.

Susie gets the picture and then continues talking to John now it’s from this point forward that Susie begins to live and what’s essentially an entirely new simulated reality John has given.

Susie a piece of media that informs her understanding of the world a picture and that piece of media is not an accurate representation of reality because it’s 25 years old but from Susie’s point of view she lives every day of her life after the fact talking to John believing that she’s speaking to a 25 year old person.

Just as most people today live every day of their lives believing that the media they consume is them interfacing with reality this is one of the primary points Baudrillard making here in our societies we no longer make distinctions between representations of reality and reality itself the representations become the real, and then the media creates representations of those representations and once again the whole process continues.

Now just to further this example you can imagine if Susie had no intention of ever meeting John, and John had no intention of ever meeting Susie Susie could go the rest of her life never questioning this media depiction of reality and she would just never know that she hadn’t actually been talking to someone her age whereas if she got suspicious and did some investigating maybe check the metadata of the picture hire a private investigator Susie would rightfully at that point feel betrayed taken advantage of she might feel like every day that she had been talking to John.

Jean Baudrillard when left with the choice between the simulated world and the real world the vast majority of people are going to choose the simulation we are not helpless victims in this world where the media feeds us disinformation many times were active participants in it most people have no desire whatsoever for the deeper more nuanced complexities of the world most people want to be given their daily dose of the simulation and then continue with their lives believing in a rigid oversimplified worldview comfortably distracted from the reality of things consider for a second just how much information the media makes available to us consider the sheer numbers of just how many possible worldviews you could subscribe to given the access to information.

We have within our simulation you can be a Christian, a Democrat, a hardcore conspiracy theorist and all of those positions are completely justifiable because we live in a world where at any instant you can go to google.com type in any statement you want to believe about the way the world is and then be flooded with media making the case for you being right media that you can then use as the

reputable evidence proving that you’re right and that everyone that fundamentally disagrees with you is a victim of fake news this is a hallmark of this particular postmodern society.

Jean Baudrillard the ultimate metaphor for this particular postmodern society is the freeway because when you look at a freeway what do you see you see tons of

people all isolated in their cars speeding in all different directions going places but nobody knows, where anybody’s going, nobody knows who anybody is what they value they’re just in your life one second, and then gone the next never to be seen again.

This is what the lives of so many people come down to alone in a simulation working at a job to make money to buy things to express who they are based on the rules the media is set out for them conditioned by and willfully complicit in a system that feeds in their worldview every day destined to a life of having conversations about surface-level politics or economics while watching the world pass them by on a TV screen.