Simulations

Jean Baudrillard 1981 Simulations - Mechanised reproduction has divided us from original/authentic objects; 'Simulacra' refers to the copy without an original. There is difficulty in distinguishing between what is real and what is not. Media influences have blurred the distinction between what is real and what is imaginary.
'Simulation refers to the collapse of this distinction between real (Original, innate, substantive) and simulated (constructed, imaginary). The result is a society/culture of hyperreality.'
What I think Baudrillard is saying is that we have allowed ourselves to become so absorbed by the media that we no longer live in a society of 'reality', our simulated world means we have no means of differentiating between fake and real. We are literally living in the hyperreal and there is no way of avoiding this. We watch our televisions about 'fake' people and their 'fake' lives and are completely drawn in; we discuss this with our friends talking as though the people we are discussing are real, even to the extent where actors have been assaulted for having a 'bad' character. This shows again the way in which we do live in a simulated world. Media influence has taken away the reality and replaced it with 'things'; objects, imaginary lives, copies of things that do not even exist, this causes us to live in a state of hyperreality.
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''Reality' has been replaced by the hyperreality of our simulated world ... it is the techno,logies of simulation themselves that rule.' (Roberts 2000:153)
Simulation:
-the process in which representations of things come to replace the things being represented . . . the representations become more important than the "real thing"
-4 orders of simulation:
    1. signs thought of as reflecting reality: re-presenting "objective" truth;
    2. signs mask reality: reinforces notion of reality;
    3. signs mask the absence of reality;
            -Disneyworld
            -Watergate
            -LA life: jogging, psychotherapy, organic food
    4. signs become simulacra - they have no relation to reality; they simulate a simulation
            -Spinal Tap
            -Cheers bars
            -new urbanism
            -Starbucks
            -the Gulf War was a video game
(http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Anthro/Anth206/jean_baudrillard_and_hyperrealit.htm)