1. The future
as if we know…..

2. Jean Baudrillard
 French theorist ( 1929-2007) will form the basis of
our study of the future debate concerning
collective identity.
 In media he is know for the three concepts
simulacra and simulation and hyper- reality
 Amongst others he was influenced be Barthes
and looked at the meaning of signs from a
cultural point of view.

3. Simply put
 The signs and symbols of your culture have no
basis in reality but have created a new world,
one that is a simulation of reality and construct a
perceived reality
 To simulate – to pretend to have something one
does not have
 The term simulacrum goes back to Plato who
used it to describe a false copying of something

4.  He believed that in this post modernist world the
illusion has gone that media texts can
accurately or neutrally reproduce reality or truth.
 He introduced the idea of hyperreality, with
blurred boundaries between the real and the
fictional. EG Disney world, exists in the real world
yet is based on a fictional make believe one.

5. Signs – the four stages
 Sacramental order – where the sign is a a faithful copy, ,a
‘reflection of a profound reality’
 Maleficence order - Perversion of reality, unfaithful copy which
‘mask and denatures’ reality as an ‘evil appearance’, hinting
at another reality
 Sorcery order- when the sign masks the absence of a profound
reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy,
but is a copy with no original
 Pure simulation – simulacrum has no relationship to any reality
at all. Signs reflect other signs, No longer need even to pretend
to be real. Consumers live in such an artificial world even
claims to reality are expected to be artificial, a hyperreality.

6. Distance from reality
 Believes that contemporary media are
responsible for blurring the line between things
that are needed to life and those needed
because of commercial images
 Urbanization – separating us from the non-
human world leads to a form of alienation
 Language and ideology –increasingly reflecting
the position of power group in relations between
social groups.

7. Representation/Simulation
 That a sign represent people or things in
increasingly a thing of the past instead replaced
with simulations of reality. This creates this
hyperreal world
 'Simulation', on the other hand, supplants these
negotiated relationships between representation
and reality, replacing them with relationships
that operate only within the media. The theory of
simulation is a theory of how our images, our
communications and our media have usurped
the role of reality, and a history of how reality
fades. (Cubitt 2001)

8.  A defining moment in the development of this
approach is Guy Debord's Society of the
Spectacle (1967), which argues that the
saturation of social space with mass media has
generated a society defined by spectacular
rather than real relations
 We are so surrounded with screens and print,
surrounded with these images that have been
mediated that we have lost any connection to
the real world.

9. Generated world
 And this has led to a spectacular world that
reality just cant match. Where things are bigger,
more exciting
 The nature of simulation over that of
representation has been forwarded as being of
fundamental importance to questions of the
future of the media and culture - a culture, it is
claimed, that is increasingly de-realised by the
screens of the mass media.

10.  A world transformed into sheer images of itself
and for pseudo-events and 'spectacles'...a
society where value has been generalized to the
point at which the very memory of value is lost, a
society of which Guy Debord has observed, in
an extraordinary phrase, that 'the image has
become the final form of our desires. (Jameson
1991)

11. CGI and its impact
 CGI heightens the visual, making it more
spectacular, leading to the importance of the
visual over all other aspects of cinema.
 The visual becomes king, Avatar for example,
the increase of 3D, a creation of a special
effects world that real life just cant live up to.