Essay on Simulation ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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For a number of social theorists the “postmodern” age, saturated by mass media, is dominated by an endless stream of simulations, imitations, and representations of reality where an original never existed. This world of dreams and images is largely a product of advertisers, marketers, and political consultants who create and disseminate the spectacles and simulations of “hyperreality.”

For most of history, communication has attempted to describe or “re-present” reality, or at least a particular version of reality that describes the nature of the world. In 1967 (1986), Umberto Eco noted the proliferation of the artificial, the fake, the imitation and the replica was the new reality, a “new hyperreality” that was especially evident in Disneyland, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, primary realms of recreations that were better than the real. In the magical realms of Disney, imitations of Main Streets, German castles, animatronic people, animals, and monsters, stood as prototypical expressions of an artificial realm of mass produced replicas and fantasies. The USA was a land of fake history, fake art, fake nature, and fake cities where imitations did not so much represent reality, but created a better version” of history without oppression, art without flaws, jungles without danger and cities without crime, dirt, or even actual people.

For Jean Baudrillard, we now live in a new, postmodern, “semiurgical” society, based on semiotics, the production and interpretations of meanings in which acts and objects served as ”signs” that have relationships to each other to produce texts. ”Postmodern society” consists of an unending stream of simulacra-signs, symbols and meanings, representations, detached from actual objects. Today, mass produced and mediated representations in newspapers, magazines, radio, film, and TV have transformed the way people experience themselves and their world.

There is no longer a distinction between the representation and reality. We now live in a world where mass mediated communication and mass produced simulations, fakes have created a new order of reality, a spectacular hyperreality of images, simulations, and mythologies that have no connection with actual reality. The “real” has imploded and been replaced by codes of reality. Nor does this simulated reality “hide truth” behind appearances; rather, there are no more truths” other than the simulated images that now dominate our culture.

Producers of simulations such as advertisers, politicians, or celebrities attempt to manipulate the public by controlling the interpretive frameworks – the code. The code is an over-arching mode of sign organization that influences the “correct” or widely accepted interpretation. The masses get bombarded by images (simulations) and signs (simulacra) which encourage them to buy, vote, work, play, but eventually they become apathetic (i.e. cynical). “Public opinion” has become more “real” than actual people. For Hedges (2009), we now live in an “empire of illusion” were people are no longer concerned with knowing the truth – the image is sufficient. This creates a world in which consumerism leads to the “goods life,” while congenial, photogenic, yet often inept leaders are elected, disastrous policies appear brilliant while a public exposed to thousands and thousands of media images show little concern or outrage.

Yet some critics worry. The endless images and meanings of consumer society has engendered “pseudo needs” to consume, that much like the drudgery of work under capitalism, have fostered alienation and in turn, powerlessness and passivity. The fetish of the commodity form has now colonized everyday life; subjective experiences were imitations of experience. Individuals have become simulations of self that are articulated in spectacular self-presentations. “Being human” has become equated with “buying and having” things, and “having” has been transformed into appearances. The domination of appearances, what seemed plausible, or even true, has isolated the present from history and maintained the status quo as an eternal today.

Bibliography:

Cubbit, S. (2000) Simulation and Social Theory. Sage, London.
Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.
Eco, U. (1967) [1986] Travels in Hyperreality. Harcourt Brace, New York.
Hedges, C. (2009) Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Nation, New York.