Originally posted by Clairaudience
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
- Jean Baudrillard
I stumbled upon a chapter called "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media " in a book titled "Simulacra and Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard.
Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic best known for his analyses of the modes of mediation and technological communication. His writing, though mostly concerned with the way technological progress affects social change, covers diverse subjects — including consumerism, gender relations, the social understanding of history, journalistic commentaries about AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the first Gulf War and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.
Jean Baudrillard
In "Simulacra and Simulation" he gives an interesting perspective on how the media has lost meaning through the constant display and ever increasing need/demand for information, Baudrillard offers three hypotheses which can be read here:
The Implosion of Meaning in the Media
The third hypotheses specifically caught my interest:
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 fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs.
I thought I would share this with the ATS community, it sure is interesting to discuss and consider the possibility of this trend manifesting in the present world. A society governed by implosion and hyper-reality, the loss of reality itself and thus the loss of meaning.
In his writings from 1975 to the present, Baudrillard projects a vision of a media and high-tech society where people are caught up in the play of images, spectacles, simulacra, communications networks, etc. that have less and less relationship to an outside, to an external “reality,” to such an extent that the very concepts of the social, political, or even “reality” no longer seem to have any meaning. And the vertinginous, aleatory, and blurry (some of Baudrillard’s favorite metaphors) omnipresent and ubiquitous media saturated consciousness is in such a state of narcosis and mesmerized fascination that the concept of meaning itself (which depends on stable boundaries, fixed structures, shared consensus) dissolves. The last decade or so of Baudrillard’s writing can be read as an attempt to think through the implications of this new primal scene, this new situation and, if possible, to find a way out. (Though he eventually concludes that there is no way out {JB 1983c}).
Douglas Kellner
What are your thoughts on this?
For now, we must use our inner self consciousness to manage this paradox duality of life. This situation however is beginning to drastically change due to more and more open minded and aware individuals that are observant about the true history of mankind. We have been made to forget this so that a few might control us through social/media/economic/political/religious/etc... means. We have the upper-hand however because we sense what is really going on in the world vs what we are told about via the media.
A society governed by implosion and hyper-reality, the loss of reality itself and thus the loss of meaning.
We already are living in a hyper reality and indeed some have lost their view on reality but the only thing we can do to help the situation is discuss controversial topics and educate others.
