lookingthroughtheconceptual-blog

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Hyperreality is Adaptable

The basis of hyperreality in an events context has been explosive with the contribution of new technologies and particularly mass media. Our postmodern world many theorists discuss has developed a crisis era of miss representation, letting independent subjectivity disappear through the masses, questioning objective reality, becoming a primary semiotic society (Perry 1998). Hyperreality theorists like Baudrillard see the death of meaning itself. Hyperreality has been brought about as a theory to understand the acceleration of mass media and the effects it has had on western culture (Smith and Clarke 2015). It is a counter-argument for what western rationalisation, looking at the differentiation between scientific, objective reality and false and subjective reality. Looking at and analysing how simulations from our current postmodern worlds hyperreality can be seen to try and understand the opposition between illusion and reality, it does not answer the characteristics contradictory to this (Tiffin and Nobuyoshi 2005). Which could potentially be answered by looking at events through different conceptual lens like a spectacle. Hyperreal lens can help bridge the gap between reality and illusion. Without this there is no need for reality to validate itself with a rational dialogue; and there is no need to normalise the original against simulacra. Therefore, one argument is that hyperreality is founded and created through mass media generated simulations that are separated from the independent subjective critique. Within hyperreality without original referent simulations can flourish without being responsible by comparison with any original (Chesler 2012)

 The effects of hyperreality can be seen to be more relevant today than when it was first established, even though it is not a relatively new concept (Smith and Clarke 2015). For example, within our culture there is the danger that individuals use the hyperreal images created by media and agents of celebrities as “role models” when it isn’t a “real” representation of the physical person that they are aspiring to be, resulting in a desire to achieve the unattainable ideal. Boorstin (1992) warned about the consumer’s potential to confuse hero and celebrity worship. “We are dangerously close to depriving ourselves of real role models” Idealising people for their fame rather than because they are great. Which can easily be seen today with people idolising, Kim Kardashian and individuals on programmes such as Geordie Shore who are famous for being able to become and obtain fame, consumers are seen to idealise this. This world supports Boorstin (1992) concerns that old hero’s such as Shakespeare and Caesar are lost. Public relations agencies did not exist to create and construct hyperreal images of the hero’s (Kellner and Durham 2005)

 I believe and concur with the theorists of hyperreality, that believe the media is used to control and form views within society. Especially within western culture for events that the people who control the mass media can therefore control how society understands the world and the events that take place. Nonetheless, both Eco (1986) and Baudrillard (1987) failed to explain how the opposite is also possible. Standards change, and in terms of hyperreality peoples’ fantasies and standards of fantasies change, the type of overstimulation of media and communication changes per new technologies as well as what the consumers want at the time. Consequently, showing that hyperreality is characteristically adaptable.

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Disney Land doesn’t let you be a child; it hides that fact that you are a child.

Disneyland and Disney films are interesting concepts that bring together and allow people to get lost in the Hyperreal world. Alice and Wonderland for myself is a great example of a film which shows a loss of sense of reality. Which is one of the reasons myself and many others get drawn to Disneyland, to escape reality and immerse themselves in a fictional world. Simulation is used to create an environment that destroys the real and the distinction between representation and reality, which leads to a manufactured hyperreality. Disneyland is a site for simulation and imagination; reality is reflected by the representation of American ideology, like a second simulacra (Baudrillard on Disneyland 2017).

 Baudrillard sees all of America as a Disneyland, with having no clear distinction between the Imaginary and real. It is a smokescreen that is relentlessly trying to hide the fact that there isn’t a difference between the two (Baudrillard 1987 (1991))

Look at Disney as an “ideological blanket” it’s an escapism for people, openly playing with the fantasies of the imaginary worlds and the quality of the fantasy worlds is what attracts consumers (me and you) to spend silly amounts and go to be a part of the hyperreality Disney have created (Baudrillard 1987). It is the objective connection to America’s reality that attracts participants, Disneyland is an “imaginary world” and everything surrounding it is “real” to maintain audience’s beliefs. This can be seen with any scandal or corruption within politics is seen to be uncharacteristic to be happening as politics is seen to reflect the ideal of democracy and morality (Smith and Clarke 2015). Disneyland is the simulation of hyperreality: a deterrence machine created to prevent the distinction between reality and fiction, truth and falsity in our political and social spaces. Baudrillard believes that this is occurring in Western society through mass media, technology and communication. Using media to make consumers aspire to want a product or lifestyle even before it exists (Snipp-Walmsley 2006) Nonetheless, this theory helps provide understanding and context for the effects and conditions of postmodernity, however, there are critiques about contradicting an individual’s action with material reality (Chaput 2001).

 Umberto Eco (1986) explains Disneyland’s hyperreality and the backdrop of the American culture further. Disney is a masterpiece of falsification within the magic enclosure allowing fantasy to be reproduced. Eco (1986) sees this as Disneyland’s purpose “to falsify our will to buy, which we take as real in the sense that Disneyland is really the quintessence of consumer ideology”. The surface of the American ideology “the pursuit of happiness” that is the consumer ideology, essentially implies through engagement in the consumer and capitalist behaviour the expectation of social mobility leads to the pursuit of happiness (Chesler 2012).

 Not only does Disneyland as an example of hyperreality produce illusions, but stimulates the desire for it by confessing to doing so: Disneyland tells us that the fake nature of it

meets and corresponds more perfectly to our fantasy demands than the real world can. Eco (1986) provides evidence that consumer ideology of Americans to what the standards of what the “real America” might be is satisfied by hyperreality.

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Hyperreality as we know it..

Jean Baudrillard a French theorist who coined the term “Hyperreality” around 1929 and since then many people have translated and interpreted their understanding of the conceptual lens. Breaking down Baudrillards traditional operational definition for hyperreality, two purposes and three functional aspects can be found: conceal reality and simulate a “better reality”. Constructing its representation through fantasy. Simultaneously, evident emotions are intended to be induced by overstimulation of media. This overstimulation allows for the third function of an internalised desensitisation to ‘reality’, through the unnatural territory of simulacra (Baudrillard translated by Smith and Clarke 2015). When aimed at the right audience, hyperreality has clearly been designed to make one feel as though they are in a “better reality”. Indirectly, as work from Eco (1986) and Baudrillard (1987) show, hyperreality for the people who engage themselves within it, appears to conceal aspects of reality from them.

 Hyperreality is when there is no clear distinction between where real begins and fiction ends they are seamlessly blended together. Inside our semiotic and postmodernist society we are looking at a new age where we have severed our connection to reality through new technological advances, mass media and communication; hyperreality creates the inability for our consciousness to distinguish reality from the simulation of reality (Tiffin and Nobuyoshi 2005). Constructed from Baudrillards Simulacra which exist as representations that have no reference to reality or historical meaning, challenging reality, truth and objectivity simulating its existence; the reproduction of “reality” within the hyperreal materialises to be more real than reality itself (Chaput 2001). Through Baudrillards lens of hyperreality there isn’t a “reality” just simulacra. Since the simulations develop aspects of reality to seem real, they cannot simply be fictional. Umberto Eco (1986) on the other hand looks at hyperreality as the copy coming first in culturally specific situations, this can be seen through an alternative view on Disney and Disneyland rather than it just being a world of simulacra it is being the personification of American ideology the “manifest destiny” that Americans strive for (Chesler 2012). It’s hard to look through one lens without seeing the concept of the other. We live in a world that our physical reality and human intelligence is mixed with virtual reality (VR) and Artificial intelligence (AI). Finding ourselves becoming immersed with the hyperreal world and less with our own physical world (Tiffin and Noyboyoshi 2005)

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbM9R53coo)

To be played whilst reading the following blog posts on hyperreality and Disneyland