Welcome dear participants.
So far in our discussions on media we have
looked how the perceptions about the role
and influence of media have changed during
the 20th century.
We have looked at how the Frankfurt School
looked at the media developments particularly
of the print technology and the rudimentary
forms of film and TV.
We have also looked at how McLuhan has looked
at media as a force, which has the capability
to change our culture and perceptions.
With this background, now, we move on to a
postmodern media.
Media in the post McLuhan world.
In this world we find that there is a constant
24/7 immersion in media in a world, which
has been saturated by different forms of media.
This post-modern world is saturated with what
is popularly known as post broadband media,
this is the era of digitalization of passing
on information in a digital manner as well
as performing and being creative in a digital
era.
So media reality is the new reality in today's
world.
In fact, there is perhaps no distinction now
as far as media, reality and our own selves,
our understandings about world and our own
self is concerned.
There is no difference between the real experiences
and the simulations for almost everybody;
however, it is also important as Julian McDougall
has pointed out to distinguish between simple
media engagement and critical media literacy.
All of us are immersed continuously in media
in a significant and permanent manner and
we can comment on the role of media.
But at the same time a critical scholar or
a person with a critical perspective and training
would be able to look at various critical
philosophies and paradigms to understand how
the media is taking a shape in a postmodern
world.
So, it is important for us now to look beyond
this idea of the Global Village to understand
how media is now blending different identities
which also happened to be simultaneously present
in us, the individual identity, cultural,
national and global.
In this continual media inundation sometimes
we find that we lose the difference between
reality and the representation of this reality.
So the distinction between truth and reality
real and imaginary reality and its digital
representation either becomes more and more
fuzzy or even invisible at moments.
We find that critics often link this change
with historical and cultural developments
particularly they point out at the difference
between modernism and postmodernism, whereas
modernist had certain binaries and could think
in terms of rationalities and certainties.
We find that the postmodernist era started
playing with the very idea of representation,
experimentation, stylistics as well as form
and content.
So we cannot simply reduce postmodernism as
a different perspective or particularly in
the context of media a different perspective
to look at media.
In the postmodern reality one should be concerned
with the collapse of distinction between media
and the reality it initially purported to
portray.
Reality can be defined and structured as well
as mediated by different images, symbols and
representations to an extend that we start
living in a continual state of simulacrum.
Images refer to each other and represent each
other also and what was taken as a broad social
reality once upon a time is now understood
in terms of reflections through media only.
Sometimes we can see that there is no reality
outside these media reflections and therefore
the concept of distorting the reality has
also become redundant because the reality
does not exist outside the media representation.
We have looked at different representative
aspects and features of postmodernist thought.
The postmodernist thought had rejected the
modernist culture and had questioned the grand
narratives of truth, meaning, language, religion
in order to understand the nature of reality
by the continuous rejection of the preferential
binary system.
It also resulted in a subversion of linear
time, our traditional understanding of space
and the way the narratives were built.
So the deliberate distortion of narrative
structures, storytelling, conventions et cetera
was encouraged to produce a sense of hyper
reality, which the postmodernist thinkers
believed is necessary for understanding the
underlying truth, traditional and dominant
structures.
And therefore we find that postmodernist literary
figures started using different techniques
like bricolage, parody, pastiche, non-linear
use of time, and representation of space which
was much more advanced than the techniques
which were used in the beginning of the 20th
century literary figures
So we find that in the post-modernist world
a climate of multiple truths and narratives
and perspectives was being established gradually
which had a certain self-referentiality and
self-reflexivity.
They also encouraged intertextuality where
texts deliberately expose themselves as constructed
texts.
And therefore the rejection of the idea that
one takes is superior than the others became
a natural corollary as the judgement was not
in terms of what is true or what is valid,
but it was always understood as a matter of
taste in the postmodernist world.
If you look at the post-modernist thought
from the perspective of media criticism, we
find that in this postmodernist idea there
was no pure reality which existed outside
the image which purported to represent it
and at the outside we can say that hyperreality
is in fact is simulated reality.
But objective reality does not exist anymore
and has been replaced by a simulated experience.
The idea of the truth ultimately became just
a competing claim or a competing discourse,
it was a product of pure imagination and therefore
this hyperreality, this simulated reality,
also convinced us that objective reality exist
in fact whereas it does not exist.
Critics like Baudrillard have referred to
the idea of amusement parks particularly Disneyland
to support their ideas and this aspect of
their critical thought we would discuss later
on.
Media texts can challenge the notion that
stories and narratives present a neutral and
objective or accurate picture of truth or
reality and at the same time, interestingly
they can also promote this illusion that their
report happens to be a neutral and objective
one.
So, the deconstruction of truth claims to
challenge the hegemonic ideas or what was
taken as the truth around which grand narratives
were constructed during the modernist era.
The major philosophers of the postmodernist
era are Lyotard, Foucault and Baudrillard.
The idea of simulacra and simulation, which
has dominated media criticism of late, was
given a particular shape by the French semiotician
and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard 1929
to 2007.
He is a very contemporary critic.
He is a major postmodernist thinker and philosopher
who has built upon the theory of science given
by Charles Sander Pierce which was about how
interpretation plays a key role in understanding
the web of reality.
Reality which was not understood as a concrete
phenomena, but it was at best understood as
a web of different features playing simultaneously
and therefore how interpretation plays a key
role in understanding this web of reality
has been the basic contribution of Baudrillard.
In his later work Baudrillard has turned towards
the theories of mediation and mass communication.
Initially he started to contest the theories
presented by Marshall McLuhan.
But later on we find that he agrees with the
ideas presented by McLuhan.
And he has moved in his work towards a historical
contextualization of structural semiology
and looks at how interpersonal and other social
relations are formed by the forms of media
and communication which are employed by the
people at any given time.
The concept of simulacra was discussed widely
during the 1970s and 80s and simulation is
the current stage of simulacrum.
Real as a point of reference in the process
of simulation is in idea which has developed
through different stages.
At the same time, we can see that the different
stages of Human Development have had a particular
dominant simulacrum.
For example, during the times of renaissance
the reference points were ideas like nobility
or what constitutes holiness et cetera.
During the times of industrial revolution,
we find that it was the product and later
on the ceaseless production line, the chain
line production which became the referring
point.
During the modern times, we find that it is
not the reality, but the model of reality
which can always be reproduced and reworked.
So copies earlier used to maintain a reference
to the original so that they could be compared
and contrasted with the original.
But now we find that during this age of postmodernist
hyperreality there is no original, no reality
and we have to look at only the images and
science and thereby construct our understanding
of the world around us.
Simulacra are copies that depict things that
either had no original or the original for
which does not exist anymore.
The postmodernist idea suggest that our age
has replaced reality by symbols and signs
and these simulacra are not a mediation of
reality anymore.
They hide the fact that nothing like reality
is relevant overcurrent understandings of
lives.
It is the symbolism of culture and media that
constructs the reality, as we perceive it
today.
And therefore because of this very nature
of simulacra dominating our culture meanings
are becoming interminably mutable and therefore
they become also empty and purposeless and
simulation is the imitation of the operation
of a real-world process or system over time.
Baudrillard is intensely concerned with the
term and suggest that this term is essential
to comprehend how we look at media and its
impact on our culture.
The notion of simulation in its interaction
with our perception of the real and the original
reveals the identity of media not only as
a means of communication, but more dominantly
as a means of representation how for example
a work of art is ultimately a replication
of some reality which existed essentially
and objectivity outside it.
At an advanced stage of its development, we
find that media is integrated with the real
experiences of the people and therefore it
becomes difficult for them to distinguish
the unmediated sensation from the mediated
one and therefore one can easily confuse the
simulation with its source.
The simulation is also different from the
image or the icon and what is being forged
and represented through media now is not a
likeness of a static entity.
But instead only the process of feeling it
and experiencing it and representing something
which perhaps does not exist outside the representation.
The concept of simulacrum as we have discussed
had gained critical attention during the 1970s
and 80s.
It also gained impeaches because of certain
contemporary changes which were taking place
in our society as well as in the area of technological
advancements.
There was a situation of the public imagination
with the spread of electronic media and communication.
The technological digital cycles were taking
a definite shape and grip over our imagination
and psyche, telematic networks started and
there was a growth of personal media as well
as mass media and critics felt that the purpose
of an event which was being represented by
the media was only the continuous reproduction
through advertisements or similar media attempts.
So media representation delinked from the
representation of a reality rather the representation
of media in itself started to have a constructed
nature and this idea has foreshadowed the
opinion of Baudrillard as far as the role
of media in our postmodern world is concerned.
The idea of pseudo-event as suggested by Boorstin
and Debord is associated with the dominance
of mass media communication and the mediation
of reality and relations through circulation
of images with the help of media.
Baudrillard was also influenced by the work
of Walter Benjamin particularly his essay,
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
published in 1936.
And contemporary understandings of simulation
have also developed out of this work of Benjamin,
which was later reworked by Boorstin and Debord
in the 1960s, but as we understand this phenomena
today has been shaped by the thinking of Baudrillard.
Simulation according to these critics has
to do with the disjunction between the reality
and its representation or the image which
is being circulated by the media.
It also has to do with the disjunction between
sign and its referent as well as the disjunction
between presentation and representation, Baudrillard
has based his understanding of this feature
of simulacra on a particular court from a
Greek philosopher.
I have put a question mark (?) after this
word ‘quote’ because some critics feel
that this quote itself which has been quoted
by Baudrillard is in fact an interpolation.
In anyways the quote reads the simulacrum
is never what heights of the truth.
It is a truth that hides a fact that there
is none the simulacrum is true.
Borges, a particular philosopher, Jorge Luis
Borges in his work on Exactitude in Science
has narrated a short story of the exact nature
of representation of a territory by imperial
cartographers.
This short story or fabulist often used to
explain what is known as the Ludic Fallacy.
The Fallacy of mistaking the model or the
map for the reality or territory.
The Ludic Fallacy is one which we would take
up later on in detail when we would be discussing
the latest developments in media particularly
the video games et cetera.
But we find that Baudrillard has also taken
up this same fable given by Borges as a starting
point to suggest that in contemporary abstraction
of things it is the map now which precedes
the territory and it is not the territory
which precedes the map, thereby reverting
the traditional order of things.
He writes “Today abstraction is no longer
that of the map the double, the mirror or
the concept.
Simulation is no longer that of territory,
a referential being or substance, it is the
generation by models of a real without origin
or reality: a hyperreal”.
So, in his work simulacra and science fiction,
Baudrillard has developed the notion of the
order of simulacra which was first introduced
in symbolic exchange and death and he suggest
that the precession of simulacra develops
in four different stages.
These phases or stages point to the evolution
of a new theory of signification of the system
of science, which was initially introduced
by Saussure.
In the traditional system as the modernist
philosophy understood the signified or the
referent always preceded the signifier.
Baudrillard’s interpretation has revered
this order and in his opinion now it is the
image or the signifier or the symbol which
precedes the signified.
In fact, masses in his opinion are so dependent
now on simulacra which is basically a sign
of culture and media that creates the perceived
reality that they have lost contact with the
reality on which these signs were initially
based and therefore he makes a separation
between science and meaning, nature and culture,
truth and reality.
In the first stage, which has been suggested
as the beginning point of the precision of
simulacra we find that the real and a faithful
image or copy coexist and the images only
the reflection of a profound external reality
which actually exist in an objective manner.
In the second stage we find that it is a normal
belief that sign is an unfaithful copy and
the image mask and denatures a profound reality.
So already we find that the perception of
people has changed when we reach the second
stage of the precision of simulacra.
In the third stage the sign pretends to be
a faithful copy, but it does not have the
original anymore for comparison.
So in the third stage the sign masks the absence
of a profound reality.
So the sign pretends that it is a faithful
copy, but the people have already lost an
understanding of the objective reality.
In the fourth stage we find that even this
pretends has withered away and the signs merely
reflect other signs.
The image has no relation to any reality whatsoever,
it is its own pure simulacrum.
Cultural products at this stage do not even
pretend to have an original or a real source
anymore.
In fact Baudrillard suggest that the experiences
of consumers lives are so overwhelmingly artificial
in this stage that even affectations and pretensions
towards reality are perceived as over sentimental
and mawkish.
And therefore the reality does not exist anymore
and it is only stage of simulacra in which
people have to live.
In connection with the four phases of this
imagery Baudrillard has also defined a 3 order
of simulacra which is essential to understand,
to make sense of his concept of hyperreality,
Baudrillard has also associated each type
of simulacra with a particular historical
period.
The three types of simulacra rather the three
order of simulacra which he has described
are the natural, the productive and the third
stage is the simulations.
According to Baudrillard natural simulacra
begins during the renaissance period, the
pre-industrial, the pre-modern era in which
the original was there, but there were always
more copies than the original.
So the idea is that one original inspired
several copies, but the distinction between
the original and the copy was very clear though
at the same time we can perceive now that
even the copies had certain creativity and
certain instances of originality.
And we could still look at them as being different
from the real.
So this was also a creation of an alternative
world and the contrast between the real and
imaginary was very clear at the same time.
During the second age that is the productive
simulacra, we find that in Baudrillard’s
opinion it simultaneously occurs with the
industrial era.
During the industrial era, we find that the
boundaries between the real and the simulation
and the real and the representation begin
to get fuzzy.
Mass production of the copies of a particular
original has turned the real into a commodity.
For example, the original painting cannot
be afforded by everybody, it can be kept perhaps
only in a single museum, but it is immense
number of copies can always be available at
a very cheap rate.
This easy availability of the alternate product
of the copy threatens the real and sometimes
we find that because of technological refinements
and industrial circulation the copy starts
to look more authentic than the real one.
This particular stage opens up new possibilities
and the different worlds become accessible
to human beings which are outside of the real.
This is also a time when the robots, which
were very similar to humans at least in the
concept yet very different, started to replace
the automaton and we also have the beginning
of a different stage in terms of science fiction.
Third stage of simulation coincides with late
capitalism and postmodernity and the line
between the real and the imaginary which had
started to become blurred during the second
stage now disappears completely and simulacra
in this stage precedes the original.
Originality now at this stage has become a
redundant notion and it is impossible to differentiate
between what is real and what is imaginary.
This is also the beginning of the era of hyperreality
in this era.
Fiction is all pervasive.
It absorbs reality and reality transforms
in to a perfect simulacra of itself.
So it is during this stage that we start looking
at the hyperreality from different perspectives.
In terms of creativity, in terms of a cultural
artifact, it is also there but in terms of
scientific investigations, we find that people
have also started to think in these directions
in the context of android, cloning, duplicacy.
We have already started to think in terms
of hyperreal versions of man and at this stage
as Baudrillard has pointed out, we only have
simulacrum.
We have referred to this idea of the Disneyland,
which has been employed by Baudrillard to
explain his concept of hyper-reality.
In his opinion a simulated world of the amusement
park represents the third order of simulacra.
The park, the characters it has, the buildings
it has, the rides and the fun games it has
mask the loss of a real space outside Disneyland
to make us believe that the rest is real when
in fact all of Los Angeles and the America
surrounding it are no longer real, but of
the order of the hyper real and of simulation.
So, amusement parks mask the existence of
hyper real societies and they refer only to
themselves.
In this third order of simulacra there is
no real or original, the simulation proceeds
and determines the real as becomes evident
in this quote by Baudrillard.
In the recent developments, which have been
suggested by Nobuyoshi Terashima, we can also
understand the continuously changing nature
of hyperreality.
In the third millennium as suggested by Nobuyoshi
Terashima connectivity among factors of change
in our network global society will be further
impacted by newer combinations of media and
technology.
Hyperreality according to him is also under
transformation.
And, we find that Terashima has already started
to talk about a concept of human friendly
communication environment as it to suggest
that the communication environment is not
necessarily human friendly as if it is already
an entity which can be a nonhuman friendly
one.
So hyperreality according to him is under
transformation.
The technological capability to intermix the
virtual reality with physical reality, the
artificial intelligence with human intelligence
shall form new building blocks of hyperreality
and the results of dramatic growth of technology
such as nanotechnology, genetic engineering,
artificial intelligence and human cloning
would also change our understanding of how
hyperreality acts.
In the latest media forms, we find that it
is also represented.
So, through the synergy of PR and VR rendering
of a 2D image in a 3D virtual reality ecosystem
will be a function which would be achievable
very soon.
So if we allow further conception of an ecosystem
in which 3D images are integrated with concrete
reality in a way which is so seamless that
physical objects can coexist with virtual
objects, we would create an environment which
perhaps can be called a hyper world.
So from the idea of hyperreality proposed
by Baudrillard we are perhaps soon entering
a world where the possibility of the hyper
world is perhaps not very far off.
So we find that the postmodern media itself
has now become the new reality.
There is no particular media authenticity
and our judgements can perhaps at best be
understood as our preferences.
So the difference between the reality and
its depiction in media as it was understood
during the modernist era has now shrunken
and we live in a state of simulacrum, where
there is no absolute truth and competing narratives
are there already in abundance.
The deconstruction of what was claimed as
truth by the modernist had to be challenged
in order to understand the postmodern requirement
and therefore we find that there is a distrust
in the postmodern environment about the metanarratives.
So Baudrillard has coined the term of surface
reality as pure reality is being replaced
by hyperreality.
So media in particularly mass media as we
have looked at it up till now is a business
which governs information, entertainment as
well as the production of cultural artefacts.
These aspects of our experience of our life
are based on technologies but they are based
on technologies which are constructed within
historically specific relations of production
and social systems.
These two cannot be easily dissociated.
In this context, we find that media cannot
be understood without internet and also by
isolating itself from the changes which the
technology has brought in the capital market
and we find that the combination of these
three forces, media, technology and the capital
market is affecting every domain of our life.
Now more importantly in comparison to any
other point in the given human history, we
find that the interconnections of these forces
are creating an acute sense of hyperreality
for us on a daily basis.
There are global economic shifts which are
related with internet revolutions and artificial
intelligence.
There are corporate downsizing which are also
affecting the internet culture and media and
together we find that these forces are restructuring
the global culture as well as they are restructuring
the social media.
In turn they are also influenced by how we
look at social media.
So we stop at this point and in our next module
we would discuss what exactly is the influence
of social media on our psyche and what is
the role which media can play particularly
the social media can play in the formation
of public opinion.
Thank you.
