Baudrillard's Hyperreality - Simulacra and Simulations. The deconstruction of reality in modern media

”Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” - Jean Baudrillard, ed. Mark Poster, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, Selected writings (Cambridge : Polity, 1988), pp. 166-172.

Following nicely from last weeks input, I would like to place this week’s focus on Jean Baudrillard and his famous text ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ which explores the distortion of reality and how it is deconstructed through modern media. Baudrillard’s ideas actually completely invert Plato’s hierarchy of the forms and metaphysical philosophy. For Baudrillard, the media ultimately acts as a rather ironic barrier between reality and a certain hyperreality. To Baudrillard, hyperreality is a creation of the media which details the filtered truth which we, as an audience, receive. To him, images seen on the news or magazines are mere reincarnations of real life events. They have been edited, cropped, blurred and ultimately obfuscated as their purpose is to appeal rather than inform. Ultimately, the hyperreality bears no significance to any reality. It is it’s own simulacrum.

“If you look hard enough you can find the contrapositive, underside or opposite of any event. These multiple interpretations don’t make the world more accessible. The explosion of information, of events; makes the ability to understand the world nearly impossible.’ Wisecrack, ‘Can We Trust the Media? (Baudrillard) - 8 Bit Philosophy’, 0:48-1:05 (YouTube : Internet Source, 2015)

Baudrillard is obsessed with the seemingly obsessive filtering of images that the modern media practices. His primary ideologies heavily question the line between media designed to inform and media designed to profit from. Taking the nightly news for example; the theme of conflict seems to have monopolised the viewing agenda to the point that it could feature primarily as a core category in any broadcaster’s narrative structure. The conflicts acts as a juxtaposed proximity between our boring, monotonous lives and imminent, dramatical doom somewhere in the middle east. 

Although ultimately Baudrillard’s idea conflicts that of Plato’s hierarchy of the forms, comparison can be made through the audience’s viewing input. If the audience are compelled and conditioned to the world of forms existing inside their television screens, then they are also subscribing to the carbon copied forms of reality which have now manifested themselves as a hyperreality. Either way the audience is receiving something false, corrupted and deconstructed. The audience has a dysfunctional relationship between the television screen, and their understanding of events.

Similarities can be found between Baudrillard’s thoughts and the ‘hypodermic-syringe model’, a theory relating to the media of the 1940’s and 50’s. This theory proposed that the media had an explicit, immediate and powerful effect on their audiences. 

“The theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by ‘shooting’ or ‘injecting’ them with appropriate messages designed to trigger a desired response.” - University of Twente, ‘Hypodermic Needle Theory’ (Web source : https://www.utwente.nl/cw/theorieenoverzicht/Theory%20Clusters/Mass%20Media/Hypodermic_Needle_Theory/)

Alike Baudrillard, this theory also suggests that the media filters and constructs/deconstructs images to promote a certain message. That message, however, according to Baudrillard; completely destroys the media’s credibility as a source of information and rather than exposing reality, it deconstructs it and replaces it with a reincarnation.