Media Simualtion and The End of the Social

[jazzy_dave]

I have been reading more of the ideas of Jean Baudrillard. His theories on media and the social are thought provoking. This is a summation of one of his tenets on society and the media.

The media, simulation and “cyberblitz” constitute a new realm of experience and a new stage of history and type of society. Simulation and simulacra, media and information, science and new technologies together produce what Baudrillard calls implosion and hyperreality. These are the core of a new postmodern world which obliterates all the boundaries, categories and values of the previous forms of industrial society, while enabling new forms of social organisation.

He introduces the idea of semiurgy, or the incessant proliferation and dissemination of signs by means of mesmerising media, forever changing fashion, and the other manifestations of the postmodern carnival. We are in a reverie of media, computer information processing, entertainment, and knowledge that has replaced the industrial production and political economy as the organising principle of society.

The era of simulation is governed by models, codes and a system of general economy. He claims that in the contemporary world the boundary between representation and reality implodes, and that as a result, the very experience and ground of the real disappears. Society is governed primarily by signs and codes and the contiguous playground of meaning.

In a society in which everything is a commodity that can be bought and sold, alienation is total. He thus conceives consumption as a mode of being, a way of gaining identity, meaning and prestige in the media age. Hence, rioters are thus defined as consumers wanting to obtain the status which is denied to them.