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    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.