COMM 150: Postmodernism, 'hyperreality' and 'simiculara'

Before diving into the second half of Vivian's book on the social, cultural and political effects of mass media, we'll take a look at a philosophy called postmodernism. I think it helps explain some of the effects of mass media on our world. Or maybe the effect of our world on communications media ...

For Friday, read an introductory essay "What do we mean by 'mass media' and 'modern culture'?" by Val Pope, who writes for Lit Notes U.K., a website that helps British students prepare for their university-level entrance exams (roughly equivalent in the U.S. to junior year of college). In the meantime, you already know a lot about this stuff just by living in the modern world - what I would call a postmodernist world.

Question: Do the media create our world, or do they merely reflect it?

Another question: Is there a good answer to that first question?

Anyway, I think it'll help us as we try to keep straight some of the political, cultural and economic effects of media on modern life - or, as many call it - postmodern life.

Jean Baudrillard, a French sociologist who died a couple of years ago, had a very influential theory he called "hyperreality" - which he put in very complex language that's often hard to follow (especially when it's translated from French) but which boils down to a claim that we are so bombarded with advertising and other media messages, we can no longer distinguish between reality and images of reality that may in fact be false.

Said Baudrillard, "The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. . . The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal. . . which is entirely in simulation.

Example: How real is the image of Tiger Woods?

Another: How real is your average couch potato who sits around and drinks beer all weekend while he watches professional sports on TV?

A couple of other examples from the Wikipedia article on hyperreality in Baudrillard's philosophy:

• A magazine photo of a model that has been touched up with a computer.
  
• Films in which characters and settings are either digitally enhanced or created entirely from CGI (e.g.: 300, where the entire film was shot in front of a blue/green screen, with all settings super-imposed).
  
• A well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal).
  
• Professional sports athletes as super, invincible versions of the human beings.

There are more cited in Wikipedia. How many other examples can you think of?

There's a very good introduction to "Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality" on the website for a Vanderbilt University anthropology course. (I couldn't find the name of the author, and I wish I could so I could give credit ... it's where I got the quote about hyperreality, and it also has the best explanation I've seen of another one of Baudrillard's concepts: Simiculara.) I'll just quote from the outline:

simulation:
-the process in which representations of things come to replace the things being represented . . . the representations become more important than the "real thing"
-4 orders of simulation:
1. signs thought of as reflecting reality: re-presenting "objective" truth;
2. signs mask reality: reinforces notion of reality;
3. signs mask the absence of reality;
-Disneyworld
-Watergate
-LA life: jogging, psychotherapy, organic food
4. signs become simulacra - they have no relation to reality; they simulate a simulation
-Spinal Tap
-Cheers bars
-new urbanism
-Starbucks
-the Gulf War was a video game

Like anything else, you want to take Baudrillard with a grain of salt. But this stuff is worth thinking about.