\'Simulacra and Simulation\' is a thought-provoking book written by Jean Baudrillard in 1981. It explores the concept of simulacra, which are copies or representations that have no original referent. Baudrillard argues that in our modern society, we often mistake these copies for reality itself.The book delves into how media, technology, and consumer culture contribute to the creation of simulacra. Baudrillard suggests that our perception of reality has become distorted as we increasingly rely on images and simulations rather than direct experiences.Through various examples and analyses, Baudrillard challenges us to question the authenticity of what we see and experience in our daily lives. He raises important questions about the nature of truth, representation, and the impact of mass media on our understanding of reality.While \'Simulacra and Simulation\' may be a complex read for a ten-year-old, it introduces fascinating ideas about how our world is shaped by images and representations. It encourages critical thinking about the influence of media on our perceptions and invites readers to consider what is real versus what is constructed.
Or information has nothing to do with signification. It is something else, an operational model of another order, outside meaning and of the circulation of meaning strictly speaking. This is Shannon's hypothesis: a sphere of information that is purely functional, a technical medium that does not imply any finality of meaning, and thus should also not be implicated in a value judgment. A kind of code, like the genetic code: it is what it is, it functions as it does, meaning is something else that in a sense comes after the fact, as it does for Monod in Chance and Necessity. In this case, there would simply be no significant relation between the inflation of information and the deflation of meaning.
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Or, very much on the contrary, there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the two, to the extent that information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or that it neutralizes them. The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving, dissuasive action of information, the media, and the mass media.
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The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every commonly held opinion. Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital. Information is thought to create communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the
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Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social. And for two reasons. 1. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of
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