Simulacra and Simulations

‘Simulation.. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.’ 

- Jean Baudrillard

If we compare Jean Baudrillard’s arguments with Plato’s, there is an extreme, polemic contrast to what they both suggest within the ideology of reality. Plato proposes there is a reality beyond the deceptive world and on the other hand, Baudrillard considers the fact that any access to reality has become complex and maybe even impossible to a degree. He seems to believe that the ‘image’ that copies reality is all we have; that there is a disappearance of reality.

There are many contemporary examples, in which I believe support the ideas Baudrillard presents. The ways in which we have begun to live our lives has instant connections with the idea of hyperreality and how this has become a normal way to live.

‘Nearly 33.9 million people said they watch at least one soap episode a week and on average people spend 143 minutes catching up with their favourite shows, according to the Dalepak research. That equates to 336 days spent in front of the television over the course of an average lifetime.’ http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/07/average-briton-spends-one-year-watching-soap_n_1133490.html 2011. It is obvious to see that people of Britain like to indulge themselves into a proxy world that is not their own, yet get to feel as though they are part of it. Thus, they will inevitably develop skewed ideas of reality and relationships, which will then generate this idea of a hyper-real reality.

Another example of hyperreal in today’s world stems from the internet and social media, where most people are becoming more engaged in a world on the internet than their own reality. In computer games and virtual worlds, some people can find more confidence when they become a character than the real version of them.
This happens within social media and chat rooms, where people are more confident being someone because no one can really know who they are. There have been more extreme cases of people pretending to be someone they are the opposite of, such as on the MTV programme, ‘Catfish’.

I recently seen a more dark example of people portraying someone they are not over the internet in a documentary on Channel 4 called, ‘Hunting the Paedophiles: Inside the National Crime Agency’ 2015 which shown one of the largest, most harrowing child abuse stories in history.  ‘Beginning in 2011 it started with an Italian girl called Justina who befriended a 13-year-old boy in Britain for chats on social media. Except that “Justina” turned out to be a group of men based in Bahrain who were getting children in Britain to send them intimate photos, then threatening them with blackmail unless they took more pictures of an increasingly explicit nature.’ Telegraph.co.uk [London] 08 Dec 2015. This example was the most hard hitting one I found and shown me the dangers in which a hyper-real world can cumulate and how different people can feel/be when on social media or chatrooms, in virtual worlds where reality is lost yet can destroy lives.

Overall, I agree mostly with Jean Baudrillards idea that reality is a complex thing to achieve, and even when you believe you have achieved it there are still examples, whether it be advertising, TV programmes or social media that are skewing our reality.